Turns of a Bookworm

One regular user of the New Orleans Public Library is a woman who lives among the crab and shrimp fishermen near Lake Pontchartrain. Every two weeks, she hops aboard a bus, rides seven miles to the library, fills her shopping bag with books, and rides home again.

Not so long ago, the woman would never have darkened the library's doors-- nor would many of her fellow citizens. For years, the city's public-library system was a collection of dark buildings filled with shabby books and headed by inept political appointees. Reform groups demanded that something be done. The first trained librarian they picked died in office after only a few months. The second time they were luckier: they got a bookish, pipe-smoking Tennessean named John Hall Jacobs.

Found: $250,000. John Jacobs' first reform was to throw out thousands of obsolete books that were jamming his shelves (sample: a 1915 pamphlet on The Care of Teeth), and he soon had gotten rid of more books than he added. He streamlined every branch, put a new microfilm filing system into the main building, built new reading rooms, demanded--and got--a tripled library budget. He found a deposit of $250,000 that had been willed to the library and never used. He built two new branch libraries, one of them the first to be built in a Negro district since 1910. Last week his third new building was going up.

A bookworm himself, who was happiest poking about his own stacks, Jacobs didn't think New Orleans read enough. In 1946, he found, only about 43,000 citizens in a city of 600,000 held library cards. He felt ashamed every time he was reminded that Louisiana had the highest illiteracy rate in the U.S.

"You have to bring books to the reader," Jacobs told his staff. He began advertising the library in the papers, ran a steady list of new books. He organized his own Great Books program among doctors and teachers, lawyers and labor unions, talked factories into setting aside space for lunchtime reading. He bought two bookmobiles to roam the city five days a week, delivering books to the back districts of town. He started after the schoolkids, lecturing in classrooms, talking to teachers, enrolling the kids in a special summer reading program. Often, he found, the kids got their parents into the reading habit too.

Plowing Through Plato. By last week, Jacobs had just about doubled the number of library card holders. He had eight reading groups going, plowing through everything from Plato to the Bill of Rights. But he is proudest of the schoolkids he has turned into book lovers--the little Negro girl who read 150 books in one summer; the seventh-grader who produced a letter from his teacher saying he was smart enough to read adult books and then asked for a volume of Toynbee; the 8,000 kids enrolled in his summer reading program. Says Jacobs: "I think a child who reads, who creates new interests, will never be delinquent."

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