First (to limit the discussion). What a free public library is _not_ for.
It is not for a nursery; a lunch-room; a bed-room; a place for meeting a girl in a corner and talking to her; a conversation-room of any kind; a free dispensary of stationery, envelopes, and letter-writing; a free range for loiterers; a campaigning field for mendicants, or for displaying advertisements; a haunt for loafers and criminals. Indeed, not to specify with inelegant distinctness, a free public library, like any other similarly commodious place of free public resort, would, if permitted, be used for any purpose whatever, no matter how private or how vicious, which could be served there more conveniently than by going to one's own home, or than by having any home at all. It would be so used systematically, constantly, and to a degree of intolerable nuisance; and its purification from such uses, if they have been set up, will be met with clamor, abuse, and with any degree and kind of even violent resistance which may be thought safe, or likely to succeed. Let it not be supposed that this is an imaginary picture. It is in every point taken from actual and numerous instances, and could be illustrated by a sufficiently ridiculous series of single adventures, by any librarian of large experience. Open public premises for some of the purposes above specified might conceivably be properly supplied by the public. What is here affirmed is, that public libraries are not at present proper for them.
[4] San Francisco is at present taxed on a precise scale of one dollar to the hundred dollars of value, and on an annual total valuation of $200,000,000, which is, however, in practice somewhat, but not largely, exceeded.
Its first object is to supply books to persons wishing to improve their knowledge of their occupations. Such books as Nicholson's, Burns', Riddell's, Tredgold's, Dwyer's, Waring's, Holly's, and others, on practical architecture, building, or departments of them; the numerous collections of plans and details of domestic and other architecture; Masury's house-painting; Kittredge's metal-worker's pattern-book; Percy's, Phillips', and other books on metallurgy and mining; Dussance, Piesse, and others on soap-making, perfumery, and other branches of applied chemistry; Lock on sugar-refining; many manuals of brewing and distilling; Noad, Hospitalier, Preece, etc., on applications of electricity; Burgh's, Roper's, and other hand-books and more advanced works on steam engineering generally, locomotives, marine engines, etc.; Gaskell's, Hill's, and other business manuals; hand-books of correspondence, book-keeping, phonography; in short, text-books, both elementary and advanced, in all sorts of commercial and industrial occupations, are of the first importance in a free public library, and are constantly and eagerly used in this one. The study of such books puts money directly into the student's pocket, promotes his success in life, and the prosperity of the city. A good and active public library raises the value of every piece of real estate in the city, by thus making the city more profitable (in dollars) to live in; because it enables the intelligent and studious to earn more.