Education: Salesman in Atlanta

In most U.S. cities, the last place to find steady crowds right through the Christmas shopping season is the public library. In Atlanta, things were different this December, and with reason. A few days after Thanksgiving, the city threw open its enlarged and vigorously modernized main building; the customers crowded in all month to borrow books, or just to browse, at a rate that astonished old library hands. In what was supposed to be an “off month,” there were hardly enough seats to go round.

A good deal of the credit for all this bustle belonged to Atlanta’s new librarian. Two years ago, when Atlantans voted 1,700,000 to expand their 48-year-old Carnegie Library and its string of branches, the city gave the top job to fast-moving, chain-smoking John Carl Settlemayer, 38, onetime director of the Lincoln, Neb. library.

Canary & Lime. Settlemayer knew what he wanted to do. He had been interested in libraries since he got a job, at 13, as a part-time page boy in Cincinnati. “My primary job,” Settlemayer says, “was to shelve books. But my secondary job was to go next door and get the firemen to put out kids who made any noise.” Instead of putting people out, Librarian Settlemayer figured that he should be bringing them in —and the more the merrier.

In Atlanta, one of his first moves was to have the old building cleaned of half a century’s grime and soot. Then he repainted the inside in fresh new colors: eggshell white, canary yellow, lime green. He had the heavy, forbidding front doors taken down, put in glass doors that opened by electric eye. In the main circulation room, he set up a Recordak machine to charge books in & out photographically in a fraction of the time it used to take.

Look & Listen. Settlemayer borrowed merchandising ideas from retail stores (“Sure we are selling; we’re selling reading”). When he learned that supermarkets find it hard to sell anything stacked below knee-level, he rearranged the Atlanta library shelves accordingly. He insists that new books be displayed in the publisher’s fresh jackets, is replacing worn-out classics with bright new editions. “We even put magazines in the racks in their own covers. We don’t want them in the old ‘library’ bindings.”

In every room—from the browsing room (“Just what the name implies,” says a Settlemayer sign. “Look around . . .”), to the reference room (“Answers questions on anything and everything, from quizzes to theses and back again”)—he has installed brilliant lighting and brightly upholstered chairs. He has even had Muzak pumped in to “relax” his readers. Book circulation has more than doubled since Thanksgiving, and, once the “off season” ends, Librarian Settlemayer expects it to treble. He is still not satisfied.

Last week, like a salesman planning a new line of goods, Settlemayer set down a whole new list of New Year’s resolutions. He wanted to build up a film library, show Saturday movies to the children. He also has ideas about installing television, so that Atlantans without sets of their own can watch it without having to go to a beer parlor. Said Librarian Settlernayer: “I’d like to have as my slogan for this library: ‘Where Friends Meet.’ “