s been the want of carefully planned
and well-executed structures for books, that it may fairly be said that
mistakes have been the rule, and fit adaptation the exception. For twenty
years past, at every meeting of the American Library Association, the
reports upon library buildings have deplored the waste of money in
well-meant edifices designed to accommodate the library service, but
successful only in obstructing it. Even in so recent a construction as
the Boston Public Library building, so many defects and inconveniences
were found after it was supposed to have been finished, that rooms had to
be torn out and re-constructed on three floors, while the pneumatic tube
system had been found so noisy as to be a public nuisance, and had to be
replaced by a later improved construction.

One leading cause for the mistakes which are so patent in our library
buildings is that they are not planned by librarians but mainly by
architects. The library authorities commonly take it for granted that the
able architect is master of his profession, and entrust him with the
whole design, leaving out of account the librarian, as a mere
subordinate, entitled only to secondary consideration. The result is a
plan which exhibits, in its prominent features, the architect's skill in
effective pilasters, pillars, architraves, cornices, and balustrades,
while the library apartments which these features ornament are planned,
not for convenient and rapid book-service, but mainly for show. It is the
interest of architects to magnify their profession: and as none of them
has ever been, or ever will be a librarian, they cannot be expected to
carry into effect unaided, what they have never learned; namely, the
interior arrangements which will best meet the utilities of the library
service. Here is where the librarian's practical experience, or his
observation of the successes or failures in the reading-room and delivery
service of other libraries, should imperatively be called in. Let him
demonstrate to the governing board that he knows what is needed for
prompt and economical administration, and they will heed his judgment, if
they are reasonable men. While it belongs to the architect to plan,
according to his own ideas, the outside of the building, the inside
should be planned by the architect in direct concert with the librarian,
in all save merely ornamental or finishing work.

We do not erect a building and then determine whether it is to be a