University of Virginia Library

FOREWORD

IT was a happy circumstance for the Library War Service
with the A. E. F. in Siberia that a man like Harry
Clemons was available in such convenient proximity. Mr.
Clemons had had considerable experience at Wesleyan
University and at Princeton University (at Princeton he had
been successively instructor in English, Jacobus Fellow, and
Reference Librarian, from 1904 to 1912). Since the spring
of 1913 he had been in the Far East as professor of English
and Librarian in the University of Nanking.

His friends at Nanking give such report of him as "It is
difficult to speak in moderation of the work which Clemons
has accomplished for the University"; "Mr. Clemons has
done an appalling amount of work . . . inspiring students
with his own high ideals and his own correctness in the use
of English."

Genius for English and library work, and "appalling" industry
are characteristics familiar enough to his friends and
former colleagues at Wesleyan and at Princeton and among
the most obvious to the reader of this collection of reports.

The collection consists of the letters and cablegrams sent
to headquarters of the Library War Service from December
6, 1918, to May 18, 1919, together with an extract
from a letter to Mrs. Clemons, kindly copied and forwarded
by her to the Library War Service as an illustration of some
of the difficulties of the work in Siberia where, Mr. Clemons
remarks, "long" means time even "more than distance."

The work of editing has been of the simplest sort—the material
has been treated as making up a historical document of
the Library War Service in Siberia. Consequently the text
is fairly complete; achievements, difficulties, pleasant association
and co-operation, and the lack of co-operation, have
all been left to appear at their best and at their worst. The
brief omissions are: (1) military and quasi-military information;
(2) personal matters, such as salary arrangements—
only enough of this has been left to show the slow and complicated
processes by which money, particularly salary, as

well as most other things, "got through"; (3) a certain
amount of repetition and occasional fullness of exposition not
necessary in particular passages when the series of reports
is to be read as a whole; and necessarily excluded from a
pamphlet of limited dimensions.

As the editing was more or less a formal matter in dealing
with the content, so it was almost to the merest comma. To
Mr. Clemons' "correct use of English" may be added all such
matters as punctuation and capitals, and all this in spite of
the fact that these routine matters of administration were
recorded in full detail, and in handwriting at that—the last
letter speaks of the promised Corona typewriter as not yet
arrived. The finished character of the work as a document
is accompanied by a literary finish and characteristic bits of
humor not usually to be expected in reports. "With money
in yen and sen and roubles and kopecks, your representative
in Siberia hath feelings of an addled brain," ends up an
intricate financial exposition before the reader's interest begins
to lag. "Thus do we introduce the short story into the long
Siberian night" would relieve even the Siberian night of the
dryest statistical report. The suggested sign for the periodicals
pile, "All is not literature that litters," would cheer the
most despondent camp librarian in a deluge of periodicals, and
"War unfits a man for the sterner pursuits of life" could
almost console an enlisted stay-at-home. And so on.

The report to the Commanding General shows the activity
as well as the activities of the A. L. A. Library War Service
in Siberia; how, in five months, one man was able to handle
some ten thousand volumes (plus 10 boxes, 194 parcels, 75
mail sacks, not counting discarded magazines), unpacking,
censoring, sorting, cataloguing, and repacking; to distribute
and organize these into a system of over fifty branches scattered
all the way from the Yangtse Valley to no one knows
how far towards the German frontier (not to mention gift
distribution); and at the same time to act as reference department
and superintendent of no inconsiderable circulation;
and, on top of all this, to produce, in slow, longhand manuscript,
and in spite of obstacles like frozen ink, etc., a series
of reports of real historical value and among the chief literary
"by-products" of the Library War Service.