A Librarians Open Shelf | Page 7

than how they were first led to the use
of a library.
These reports are far from possessing merely a passing interest for the
curious. For the public librarian, whose wish it is to reach as large a
proportion of the public as possible, they are full of valuable hints.
They emphasize, for instance, the urgent necessity of winning the good
will of the public, and they forcibly remind us that this is of more value
in gaining a foothold for the library than columns of notices in the
papers or thousands of circulars or cards distributed in the
neighborhood. It is even more potent than a beautiful building.
Attractive as this is, its value as an influence to secure new readers is
vastly less than a reputation for hospitality and helpfulness.
In looking over the figures one rather disquieting thought cannot be
kept down. If the good will of the public is so potent in increasing the
use of the library, the ill will of the same public must be equally potent
in the opposite direction. Some of those who are satisfied with us and
our work are here put on record. How about the dissatisfied? A record
of these might be even more interesting, for it would point out
weaknesses to be strengthened and errors to be avoided--but that, as
Kipling says, "is another story."

THE PASSING OF THE POSSESSIVE: A STUDY OF
BOOK-TITLES
If there is one particular advantage possessed by the Teutonic over the
Romance languages in idiomatic clearness and precision it is that

conferred by their ownership of a possessive case, almost the sole
remaining monument to the fact that our ancestors spoke an inflected
tongue. That we should still be able to speak of "the baker's wife's dog"
instead of "the dog of the wife of the baker" certainly should be
regarded by English-speaking people as a precious birthright. Yet, there
are increasing evidences of a tendency to discard this only remaining
case-ending and to replace its powerful backbone with the
comparatively limp and cartilaginous preposition. This tendency has
not yet appeared so much in our spoken as in our written language, and
even here only in the most formal parts of it. It is especially noticeable
in the diction of the purely formal title and heading.
That the reader may have something beyond an unsupported assertion
that this is the case, I purpose to offer in evidence the titles of some
recent works of fiction, and to make a brief statistical study of them.
The titles were taken from the adult fiction lists in the Monthly
Bulletins of the New York Free Circulating Library from November,
1895, to March, 1897, inclusive, and are all such titles as contain a
possessive, whether expressed by the possessive case or by the
preposition "of" with the objective. Some titles are included in which
the grammatical relation is slightly different, but all admit the
alternative of the case-ending "'s" or "of" followed by the objective
case.
Of the 101 titles thus selected, 41 use the possessive case and 60 the
objective with the preposition. This proportion is in itself sufficiently
suggestive, but it becomes still more so by comparing it with the
corresponding proportion among a different set of titles. For this
purpose 101 fiction titles were selected, just as they appeared in
alphabetical order, from a library catalogue bearing the date 1889; only
those being taken, as before, that contain a possessive. Of these 101, 71
use the possessive case and 30 the objective with "of." In other words,
where eight years ago nearly three-quarters of such titles used the
possessive case, now only two-fifths use it, a proportionate reduction of
nearly one-half.
The change appears still more striking when we study the titles a little
more closely. Of those in the earlier series there is not one that is not
good, idiomatic English as it stands, whichever form is used; we may
even say that there is not one that would not be made less idiomatic by

a change to the alternative form. Among the recent titles, however,
while the forms using the possessive case are all better as they are, of
the 60 titles that use the objective with "of" only 22 would be injured
by a change, and the reason why 8 of these are better as they are is
simply that change would destroy euphony. Among these eight are
"The Indiscretion of the Duchess," "The Flight of a Shadow," "The
Secret of Narcisse," etc.,
where the more idiomatic forms,
"The Duchess's Indiscretion," "Narcisse's Secret," "A Shadow's Flight,"
etc.,
are certainly not euphonic.
Of the others, 8 would not be injured by a change, and no less than 30
would be improved from the standpoint of idiomatic English. It may be
well to quote