Education: Generosity in Brooklyn

Sizzling over a report submitted to him by a special investigator, New York’s Mayor LaGuardia last week capped the sorry tale of the five Brooklyn College basketball players “expelled” for taking bribes to throw a game (TIME, Feb. 12) by revealing that one of them had never even been a member of the college. Discharged from the Army in December 1943, Larry Pearlstein simply borrowed two books from the Brooklyn College library, walked around the campus until his face became familiar, then went out for basketball and made the team. Barked the Mayor: “It indicates a … negligence on the part of the college faculty responsible that borders on the unpardonable.”

Brooklyn College President Harry D. Gideonse countered lamely: “At a time when the college had little experience with the special requirements of returning veterans, Mr. Pearlstein abused the college’s deliberate policy of generous flexibility.”

Book Relief

One of the first moves in both German and Jap schemes of conquest was to destroy free men’s ideas by destroying their books. In 1938, while the Nazis were systematically looting some 400 libraries in Czechoslovakia, the Japs deliberately dropped 50 bombs on China’s National Hunan University in Changsha. The National Tsinghua University at Peiping lost many precious books and manuscripts, some irreplaceable.

With the beginning of World War II, these ravages became wholesale. In Naples, the Royal Society Library was burned in reprisal for the shooting of a Nazi in a nearby street. In Athens, the books of three American colleges reportedly were used to stoke furnaces. Not all the destruction was deliberately aimed at books, but the results were the same. In England, the contents of at least 50 libraries, plus some 6,000,000 books in stalls and publishing houses, have been bombed into dust.

ABC, Inc. Since October 1943 this stupendous loss has been the prime concern of the American Library Association’s Board on International Relations. After much exploring of ways & means, the Board, with the help of the State Department and the Library of Congress, convened representatives of all interested agencies, last week took steps to form a corporation. Its name: American Book Center, Inc. Its purposes: 1) to replace lost books; 2) to supply the world’s libraries with recent U.S. publications.

ABC will ask every potential source in the U.S. to donate both English and foreign-language books and periodicals. It will store them in warehouses on the East and West Coasts. There representatives of the various countries may make their selections. Another suggestion: orders may be taken at a sample-library, set up somewhere in Europe, of single copies of all wartime U.S. publications.

Funds for ABC will be solicited from business concerns which have foreign interests. The Rockefeller Foundation has already chipped in $2,500 for a starter. Kenneth Shaffer, librarian at the University of Indiana, has been appointed director of ABC at $5,000 a year.

ABC’s sponsors well realize that they cannot hope to replace more than a fraction of what has been lost. But they would not, even if they could. Said brisk Luther Evans, Acting Librarian of Congress: “Those libraries oughtn’t to get back all the books they had. … All libraries ought to destroy about three times as much as they do. … [They] clutter up their shelves with too much junk, and they never weed out the deadwood. . . .”