Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Books for Boys and Girls Approved by the Brooklyn Public Library: For Use in Its Children's Rooms
The children's department of the public library aims to be a nursery of good citizenship. Every book placed on its shelves must be tested by its relation to this aim. Books which inspire to patriotism and breadth of sympathy by thrilling accounts of a nation's heroic struggles, be that nation America or China, are of direct use in this work. So is a book suggesting occupations useful and amusing that will train a child's eye, hand and brain and help to make a vigorous body. So also are the poems that sing into young hearts enthusiasm for loyalty, courage, fidelity and purity, and which give a world of imagination, a grace of thought and vocabulary to offset the sordidness of life in the city streets.
The first test we apply to any book for children is that for moral tone. By this we do not mean the story of the drunkard reforming child saint of Sunday School library books so edifyingly contrasted with the naughty boy who goes fishing on the Sabbath and comes to a bad end; nor the golden-curled, lace-collared, polite little prig who adorns the pages of scores of little child shall lead them stories of the present. Not pages slashed with cutlasses reeking with gore, not hairbreadth escapes and feats of super human daring does the children's librarian condemn, but heroes pre-eminent in lying and trickery, in smartness and swagger, in the loafer's reliance upon luck; books which subtly teach a lad to measure a man's value and success by his money-getting ability. If a book arouses in a child admiration for courage, honor, endur ance, manliness or womanliness, faithfulness, pluck, gentleness, then that is a moral book. Whether it be a story of pirates, as Treasure Island, of a schoolboy, as Tom Brown's School days.
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