The series in 1900was on Books about knights and tournaments,what happened to a man who read too much about knights (Don Quixote),Books about horses,Two dream-stories,(The divine comedy and The pilgrim's progress),Some funny adventures (Atraveller's true tale and others),Some new books,How a book is made,Stories about India,Pictures and scrap-books.
The next year,1901,the talks were about stories connected with English history,the Old-English,the Normans,the Plantagenet times,King Henry V.,the Wars of the Roses,King Henry VII,and King Henry VIII,Queen Elizabeth and Mary,Queen of Scots,the Stuarts,and the English Revolution and eighteenth-century England.
The year after,1902,the talks were on "Books that you have not read,"under the titles Sea stories,Indian stories,Horse stories,Wonder stories,Hero stories,African stories,South Sea stories,School and college stories,Old stories.A table of books was in the room,and I took them up one by one and told a little about the story,sometimes reading aloud and stopping at a very interesting point.
In 1903,the subjects were Stories about dragons,Stories about soldiers,Stories about shipwrecks,Stories about out-of-doors,Stories of real people told by themselves,Stories about adventures,Stories about pictures,Stories about the West,the object being to give the children of the upper grammar grades a glimpse into interesting books of which they might otherwise never hear.In that year we printed a list of novels for young readers that is now ten years old and needs revision,but still has its uses.
The use of the reference-room by children steadily increased,until the need of a room for them became evident,both on weekdays and Sundays.The Bulletin for March 1,1900,says:"On Sunday,Feb.25,there were eighty-one children in the small room,filling not only chairs too high for their short legs,but benches extending into the circulation room.They were all quiet and orderly,and some of them read seriously and absorbedly for several hours on 'The twentieth century,''The boundaries of the United States,'and 'The comparative greatness of Napoleon and Alexander.'The younger children read storybooks in the same quiet manner.A children's room would relieve the pressure on all three departments of the library."The "last straw"that led to the grant of rooms was a newspaper article illustrated by a photograph of the reference-room on a Sunday afternoon with one man,one woman and fifty-one children in it.
In 1904,the library came into possession of two large,bright sunny rooms and a smaller one adjoining in an old-fashioned house next door,which belonged to the Athenaeum and had been released by the removal of the Hartford Club to a large new house across the street.We opened rooms in November,just before Thanksgiving,and from then till New Year's Day we received gifts from many friends:a pair of andirons for the open fireplace,several pictures,a check "for unnecessary things"from one of the women's clubs,another for wall-decoration from teachers,students and graduates of the Albany Library School,fifty Japanese color-prints of chrysanthemums from the Pratt Institute children's room,a cuckoo clock that is still going,though it demands a vacation about once a year,and a Boston fern that is now in flourishing condition.A large Braun photograph of the Madonna del Granduca came later from the Pittsburgh School for Children's Librarians.
The furniture is of the simplest kind.We used some tables that we had,and bought one new one,some bentwood chairs for the older children and others such as are used in kindergartens for the younger.Pratt Institute lent us that first winter the very attractive illustrations by the Misses Whitney for Louisa Alcott's "Candy country."Some friends who were breaking up housekeeping gave the room a case of native and foreign stuffed birds with the hope that they might be as great a source of pleasure to the children as they had been to them in their childhood.Another friend sent us two trunks of curiosities from Europe,Asia,Africa and North America,which are shown a few at a time.
The next summer,1905,the book-talks were about pictures in the room,most of which had been bought with our friends'gifts.
Windsor Castle,Kenilworth,Heidelberg Castle,The Alhambra,St.
George,King Arthur,Sir Walter Scott,the Canterbury Pilgrims,some Shakespeare stories.On the Alhambra afternoon,a girl who had spent her first year out of college in Spain described the palace and showed curiosities from Granada.One day a Civil War nurse who happened in was persuaded to tell the boys and girls in the room about the three weeks she spent in the White House,taking care of Tad Lincoln through a fever.Some years later we were fortunate enough to hear her again in the room above,on Abraham Lincoln's hundredth birthday,when she held the attention of a large number of boys and girls for more than an hour.
The next summer "What you can get out of a Henty book"was used as an excuse for showing books and pictures about the Crusades,Venice,the knights of Malta,the Rebellion of the Forty-five,the East India Company,the siege of Gibraltar,the Peninsula war,and modern Italy.
That summer we had a puzzle-club to show younger children how to work the puzzles in St.Nicholas and other magazines and newspapers.We held our first Christmas exhibition that year,1906,in the room itself,for one day only,before the hour of opening.
