123 IMPLICATIONS FOR POLICY

What people in the “typical” town use the library for is
easier to say. They use it chiefly in order to borrow books for
home reading, and usually they read the books they borrow.
Seldom do they simply carry books home from the library
and then back again without reading them. Almost two thirds
of the borrowed books are fiction, and almost one half of
them are juvenile. A large proportion of the circulation is
composed of recently published titles, whose circulation
might be even greater could the library provide sufficient
copies to meet the demand. “Recent best sellers” are, there-
fore, a major item in the circulation.

So are “poor quality” books. Although no one knows ex-
actly just how to define “quality” in popular reading, everyone
acknowledges that the public library circulates many titles
which would not qualify as “good” by any generally accepted
literary standard. Mystery and detective stories, love and ro-
mance fiction, adventure and western stories, recent novels
widely publicized but of little literary distinction, populariza-
tions of current affairs characterized by sensationalism and
easy dogmatism rather than by dispassionate and qualified anal-
ysis—these and similar books are widely circulated by the
public library. Literary “classics” and scholarly nonfiction
are also distributed by the public library, but not nearly so
widely. The public library, however, does serve as an im-
portant source for such books in the community./The quality
of the library circulation is neither distinctively high nor low.

The clientele for circulated books from our “typical” li-
brary is specialized, but the reference clientele is even more
limited. Housewives, who are a large segment of the book
borrowers, rarely use the reference and information services.
These are generally used by students and by professional,
managerial, and white-collar groups. Men use the reference
services much more than do women; and schooling, already
a differentiating factor in general library use, is an even more