The Philosopher's Public Library

Suppose a philosopher had a great deal of money to spend--though this is
not in accordance with experience, it is not inherently impossible--and
suppose he thought, as any philosopher does think, that the British
public ought to read much more and better books than they do, and that
founding public libraries was the way to induce them to do so, what sort
of public libraries would he found? That, I submit, is a suitable topic
for a disinterested speculator.

He would, I suppose, being a philosopher, begin by asking himself what a
library essentially was, and he would probably come to the eccentric
conclusion that it was essentially a collection of books. He would, in
his unworldliness, entirely overlook the fact that it might be a job for
a municipally influential builder, a costly but conspicuous monument to
opulent generosity, a news-room, an employment bureau, or a
meeting-place for the glowing young; he would never think for a moment
of a library as a thing one might build, it would present itself to him
with astonishing simplicity as a thing one would collect. Bricks ceased
to be literature after Babylon.

His first proceeding would be, I suppose, to make a list of that
collection. What books, he would say, have all my libraries to possess
anyhow? And he would begin to jot down--with the assistance of a few
friends, perhaps--this essential list.

He would, being a philosopher, insist on good editions, and he would
also take great pains with the selection. It would not be a limited or
an exclusive list--when in doubt he would include. He would disregard
modern fiction very largely, because any book that has any success can
always be bought for sixpence, and modern poetry, because, with an
exception or so, it does not signify at all. He would set almost all the
Greek and Roman literature in well-printed translations and with
luminous introductions--and if there were no good translations he would
give some good man £500 or so to make one--translations of all that is
good in modern European literatures, and, last but largest portion of
his list, editions of all that is worthy of our own. He would make a
very careful list of thoroughly modern encyclopaedias, atlases, and
volumes of information, and a particularly complete catalogue of all
literature that is still copyright; and then--with perhaps a secretary
or so--he would revise all his lists and mark against every book whether
he would have two, five or ten or twenty copies, or whatever number of
copies of it he thought proper in each library.

Then next, being a philosopher, he would decide that if he was going to
buy a great number of libraries in this way, he was going to make an
absolutely new sort of demand for these books, and