WHY PEOPLE USE THE LIBRARY 55

ferent age and grade levels? Do students who come to the
library for curricular materials stay to use noncurricular
books? The answers to such questions are not now available.
One hypothesis is that the proportion of school-related use
of the library by high school students is relatively high, and
by grade school students relatively low. For children in ele-
mentary schools the evidence would suggest that the use of
the public library is not particularly school-related. For ex-
ample, juvenile circulation for one year in the Los Angeles
Public Library system showed that “easy books” and fiction
formed 82.3 percent of all juvenile circulation. The majority
of all questions asked by children in the children’s depart-
ments of six public libraries were not motivated by school
work.’

CIRCULATION CLASSIFIED BY FORM AND SUBJECT MATTER
The second traditional classification of library circulation dis-
tinguishes between fiction and nonfiction and, within -the
latter, among certain subdivisions roughly corresponding to
the major Dewey decimal classes. Such data are available in
the circulation records of public libraries because of the
classification of the book stock into such categories for pur-
poses of bibliographical arrangement: Actually, there are wide
variations of subject matter in type, quality, and level within
such categories, so that the classifications should be recog-
nized only as broad descriptions of the kinds of books which
the public library circulates. Fiction embraces Max Brand
and Thomas Mann, Kathleen Norris and Leo Tolstoy, Kath-
leen Winsor and Herman Melville. Nonfiction classes, despite
their comparatively narrow compass, also include wide ranges
of “quality” and even of subject matter. The 700 classifica-
tion, generally characterized as the fine arts, includes books
on home movies, outdoor sports, puzzles, and party games.
*Wendell, 1946.