Quincy Article

I was taken off guard when I got to the second paragraph of the Quincy article with the image of the working class family abandoning the bar in favor of the library and I had to double check in the front of the packet to see the date that it was written. Once I realized that the author came from a time when the upper class was preoccupied with moralizing the expanding working class as a means of bettering them it made more sense. It seems to me that the contemporary public library sees self-education as one of its purposes but not in the same way that Quincy does as he suggests that reading and learning instills people with a general goodness regardless of what they learn and read. At the same time Quincy optimistically envisions a library where the books would meet his personal standards of quality.

Quincy had an interesting stance on novels. Although in some people reading novels could cause mental illness (!) he was willing to admit that they weren’t bad for the entertainment of adults and when they could be supplemented with worthy non-fiction. It sounds ridiculous in present time but brought up the point that public libraries should be designed with the population that they are meant to serve in mind. Small libraries with limited fund especially need to consider what books and services will be most useful to their patrons. I was surprised that Quincy was in favor of having periodicals and even free pamphlets in a public library because I would think that those types of documents could carry just a dangerous kind of ideas as a novel could.