first place it means telling those who want books where they may get them.
This simple task is rarely performed completely or satisfactorily. It is
astonishing how many inhabitants of a large town do not even know where
the public library is. Everyone realizes this who has ever tried to find a
public library in a strange place. I once asked repeatedly of passers-by
in a crowded city street a block distant from a library (in this case not
architecturally conspicuous) before finding one who knew its whereabouts;
in another city I inquired in vain of a conductor who passed the building
every few hours in his car. In the latter case the library was a beautiful
structure calculated to move the curiosity of a less stolid citizen. In
New York inquiry would probably cause you to reach the nearest branch
library, anything more remote than that being beyond the local
intelligence. Sometimes I think we had better drop all our far-reaching
plans for civic betterment and devote our time for a few years to causing
citizens, lettered and unlettered alike to memorize some such simple
formula as this: "There is a Public Library. It is on Blank street. We may
borrow books there, free."

You will notice that I have inserted in this formula one item of
information that pertains to use, not location. For of those who know of
the existence and location of the Public Library there are many whose
ideas of its contents and their uses, and of the conditions and value of
such uses, are limited and crude. The advertising that succeeds in
bettering this state of things is surely doing an economic service. All
these things the self-respecting citizen should know. But beyond and above
all this there is the final economic service of advertising--the causing a
man to want that which he needs but does not yet desire. Every man, woman
and child in every town and village needs books in some shape, degree,
form or substance. And yet the proportion of those who desire them is yet
outrageously small, though encouragingly on the increase. Here no