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Modern library science is yet in its adolescence as compared with architecture, but it is a robust youth. It already knows definitely what it wants, and what it does not want. For guidance, it has a copious literature of first instance, scattered through various pamphlets and four score back volumes of periodicals. It is beginning to have a literature of last instance, in book form, like Duff-Brown in England and Bostwick in America; and even a formal literature about library buildings, Burgoyne and Champneys abroad, and now this volume here. It is very satisfactory to see how these three-thousand-miles-apart authorities agree. There are still differences of method to provide material for debate at the next international conference, but we are close enough together on principles, at least, to convince any doubting Thomas that there is a library science to govern library building.

And in building there is the greatest need of further developing library science. As Fletcher says in his preface:[22]—

“One need not visit all the libraries of the country to become painfully convinced that want of adaptation to use is by no means infrequent. With regard to buildings, Lord Bacon’s judgment seems very safe: ‘Houses are built to live in, and not to Looke on: Therefore let Use bee preferred before Uniformitie.’ If this is true for houses, then a fortiori for libraries.”

But the main reliance of architects and building committees should be the living interpreter, the experienced librarian who can expound, apply and extend the written word. Here is embodied library science face to face with us, to supplement every chapter of this book by the latest developments; to explain apparent anomalies and inconsistencies; to differentiate essentials from non-essentials; to concede where concession is possible; and to maintain with conviction the requirements to which the architecture of tradition must yield.

Nor are the books closed with this volume. As a writer in “The Dial,”[23] says: “The history of Library Science is not closed. There remain an indefinite number of interesting chapters still to be written which are not unlikely to prove even more significant than any that have gone before.”