Sam Walter Foss (1858–1911)

In the 1960s, the Gale Research Company published several of Sam Walter Foss’s popular poems about library staff for a giveaway. Foss, a librarian and newspaper editor in his long career, read the poems at the ALA annual meeting in 1906 and subsequently published them in his book Songs of the average man. The company also included illustrations from that volume drawn by Merle Johnson.

This is a book of nostalgia for libraries were very different in the early part of the twentieth century show more from the libraries of the 1960s and today. Foss covers the catalogers, reference librarians, children’s librarians, library assistants and the head librarian. As a cataloger, I loved the depiction of the cataloger as handling every language known to man and every subject imaginable with a dependence on Cutter and Dewey. It is a life of rules! The reference librarian is known to her patrons as all knowing for “there is no knowledge known to mortals that is but known to her.” (He neglects to say in the poem that the real knowledge is how and where to find the information. And that hasn’t changed in a hundred years.) Children’s librarians today still deal with discipline and the imparting of knowledge. Although not stated in the poem but pictured in the illustration for the page, the librarian still reads to children. The library assistant (or desk attendant as she is called, stands with date stamp in hand, passing books to patrons. No computer checkout here.

By now it’s obvious that library workers are all female and are pictured in the dress styles from the turn of the century. However, the head librarian is male, a trend we are still seeing today, although Foss does use both he and she at times in this poem in contrast to the other four in the book. The head librarian expends the funds, deals with the book agents and hears the complaints of patrons. He learns that you can’t please everyone.

Is the poetry good? No, not really. The charm is in seeing how the profession was viewed in 1906 by a library director and contrasting it with the highly tech world of libraries today. show less