HOW TO DISCOURAGE READING

'Though Quakers scowl and Baptists howl,Though Plymouth Brethren rage,We churchmen gay will wallow todayIn apple sauce, onions and sage.Ply knife and fork, and draw the cork,And have the bottle handy;For each slice of goose we'll introduceA thimbleful of brandy.'

'Though Quakers scowl and Baptists howl,Though Plymouth Brethren rage,We churchmen gay will wallow todayIn apple sauce, onions and sage.

Ply knife and fork, and draw the cork,And have the bottle handy;For each slice of goose we'll introduceA thimbleful of brandy.'

Is it not good? I wonder who the author can be? Not Newman, I think. It is above him. Perhaps it is Bishop Wilberforce."

The Macaulays and the Wilberforces living at Clapham Common are very real people to me, and my firm allegiance to Trinity College, Cambridge, has never wavered since Macaulay's undergraduate days, not even when Samuel Wilberforce, the future bishop, went up to Oriel College, Oxford.

And how doubly precious is a book-friendship, whose introduction claims a personal touch; as when, with the same friend who bought the photograph in Rome, I afterwards visited Winchester Cathedral and standing beside the chantry tomb of Bishop Wilberforce she said, "When you go home, read his life. He was a great and good man," and I have continued reading it for nearly thirty years. Wilberforce was undoubtedly for twenty-five years the greatest figure in the English Church. His great sorrows made him tender and tolerant, and many who saw only the brilliant man little dreamed of the causes and depth of his power. He was made Bishop of Oxford in the troublous times of the Tractarian Movement, and so great was the work he accomplished and so devoted to him were his clergy that when translated to Winchester, Bishop Stubbs, who succeeded him, coming from quiet Chester, where his history was his chief occupation, ruefully asked, "Why am I like the Witch of Endor? Because I am tormented by the spirit of Samuel." His quickness and humor flashed an unexpected light on many a question, as when asked why he was called Soapy Sam he answered it was probably because he was always in hot water and always came out with hands clean. And his whimsical reply to "Who are the greatest preachers in England?"—is one of those comical self-evaluations which it is generally most hard to give—"I must refer you to an article on a lady's dress—Hook and I." His absolute freedom from personal animosity shows itself in the story I like best of all. During a stormy committee meeting in which he and the Bishop of London were violently opposed to each other, he threw a note across the table. Supposing it to be some point on the business in hand, the Bishop of London read, "My dear Bishop: You really should not wear such boots. Yourlife is too precious and valuable to us all to allow such carelessness."

Nothing could more touchingly express the devoted and loving esteem in which he was held than these words written at the time of his death: "With others who loved him, kneeling reverently beside the body, was Mr. Gladstone, whose sobs attested how deeply his feelings were moved by the sudden loss of his long-tried friend."

The last time I was in England I made a Sussex pilgrimage to his old home at Lavington. It was in June, and my companion smiled as I exclaimed with enthusiasm, "St. Barnabas day, the eleventh of June—the Bishop's wedding day!" We saw the trees he had planted and loved, the spot whence he would turn for a last homeward look, saying he was as proud of being a Sussex squire as a bishop; and best of all the great clumps of rhododendron which he planted with his own hands.

Since so many librarians are gardening as a favorite recreation, why not have a friendly corner in the garden, where we may "Consider the lilies of the field," as we are bidden in that dearest of all books, and where each mood, whether gay or somber, would find echo from the "eternal passion" of the poets—"Rosemary for remembrance, or pray you love, remember there's pansies, they're for thoughts." Growing next to these in my own garden is the fragrant Carolina allspice, because it was the best loved of flowers by Henry Bradshaw.

I sometimes question if a book is truly a friendly book unless I possess it, and yet this in a way would cut off both Thackeray and the friend whom he loved best of all, "dear old Fitz," for I gave away my "Fitzgerald's Letters" to a friend with whom I exchange many friendly books. A man of leisure and literary tastes, and in easy circumstances, Fitzgerald avoided fame as earnestly as most men seek it. Living in a country cottage with a garden, books, pictures and music, he cherished his many lifelong friendships, which he says were more like loves, by writing letters which have a touch of gentle humor and of tender and unaffected charm, as in a letter to Frederick Tennyson: "I have been through three influenzas; but this is no wonder, for I live in a hut with walls as thin as a sixpence, windows that don't shut, a clay soil safe beneath my feet and a thatch perforated by lascivious sparrows over my head. Here I sit, read, smoke and become wise, and am already quite beyond earthly things. I must say to you as Basil Montague once said in perfect charity to his friends: 'You see my dear fellows, I like you very much, but I continue to advance, and you remain where you are, you see, and so I am obliged to leave you behind. It is no fault of mine.' You must begin to read Seneca, whose letters I have been reading, else you will be no companion to a man who despises wealth, death, etc. I wish you were here to smoke a pipe with me. I play of evenings some of Handel's grand choruses which are the bravest music after all."

And again, to William Bodham Donne, when puzzled over his Agamemnon and the line of signal fires from Troy to Mycenæ, he writes, "I am ignorant of geography, modern and ancient, and do not know the points of the Beacons, and Lemprière, the only classic at hand, doesn't help me. Pray turn to the passage and tell me (quotes three lines of Greek) what, where and why. The rest I know or can find in dictionary or map, but for these:

LemprièreIs no-where:Liddell and ScottDon't help me a jot,When I'm off, DonneganDon't help me on again.

So I'm obliged to resort to old Donne again."

A postscript in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton reads—"Only a word, to add that yesterday came Squire Carlyle from you, and a kind long letter from Mr. Lowell; and the first nightingale, who sang in my garden the same song as in Shakespeare's days."

And finally, to Lawrence the portraitpainter: "Have we exchanged a word about Thackeray since his death? I am quite surprised to see how I sit moping about him, so little have I seen him the last ten years, and not once for the last five. To be sure I keep reading his 'Newcomes' of nights and now I have got hold of 'Pendennis.' I keep hearing him say so much of it; I really think I shall hear his step coming up the stairs to this lodging, and about to come (singing) into my room as in old Charlotte Street thirty years ago." And ten years later he writes, "A night or two ago I was reading old Thackeray's 'Roundabouts,' and (a sign of a good book) heard him talking to me."

I am sorry that so many people know Fitzgerald only because of the "Rubaiyat." I confess myself to be rather like-minded with

"That certain old person of Ham,Who grew weary of Omar Khayyam,Fitzgerald, said he,Is as right as can be,But this cult, and these versions,O, Damn!"

And Thackeray, there is no one book which stands for him, save, perhaps, the dear little old brown volume of letters to the Brookfields. It is here that we learn much of "Pendennis." In one letter he writes, "I am going to kill Mrs. Pendennis presently, and have her ill in this number. Minnie says, 'O Papa, do make her well again! She can have a regular doctor and bealmostdead, and there will come a nice homeopathic physician who will make her well again.'" We who truly know and love him find him ever in his own pages as he smiles kindly at us through his spectacles, or we feel the difficulty with which he is keeping his spectacles dry, and we too say, "Dear old Thackeray," as in the lines at the end of the White Squall, where with pages of nonsense, he writes how the Captain

"Beat the storm to laughterFor well he knew his vesselWith that wind would wrestle;And when a wreck we thought her,And doomed ourselves to slaughter,How gaily he fought her,And through the hubbub brought her,And when the tempest caught her,Cried, George some brandy and water.And when its force expended,The harmless storm was ended,And as the sunrise splendidCame blushing o'er the sea,I thought, as day was breaking,My little girls were waking,And smiling and makingA prayer at home for me."

One of these little girls, Minnie Thackeray, became the wife of Leslie Stephen, of whom Mr. Lowell speaks as "that most lovable of men," whose Life and Letters, so full of rich and wondrous friendships, and of deep and subtle charm, is always a midnight companion if taken up in the evening. While our serious-minded librarian may find its chief value in the chapter on "The Struggle with the Dictionary," where as editor, I presume many of us first met with Stephen, (and which would prove invaluable to Lamb's old gentleman) she will find there only a small part of the Real Leslie Stephen, who wrote one day to Edmund Gosse, "No, R. L. S. is not the Real Leslie Stephen, but a young Scotchman whom Colvin has found—Robert Louis Stevenson."

It is a temptation to linger over Stephen's letters to John Morley and Charles Eliot Norton (perhaps his closest lifelong friends), and to the rich list of literary men whom he knew so well through his long years of literary and editorial work. Like those of Lowell and Stevenson, his letters lead one constantly to the reading of his books, wherein again one always finds himself. It were difficult to imagine more felicitous titles of self-revelation than "Hours in a library," "The amateur emigrant," and "My study window." I cannot leave Stephen without a word from the "Letters to John Richard Green" (little Johnny Green) which he edited. As Macaulay used to love to prove the goods he praised by samples of quotation, I will content myself with Green's questioning Freeman, in a long letter full of Early English history: "By theway, have you seen Stubb's Hymn on Froude and Kingsley?

'Froude informs the Scottish youthThat parsons do not care for truth.The Reverend Canon Kingsley cries:History is a pack of lies.What cause for judgments so malign?A brief reflection solves the mystery,Froude believes Kingsley's a divine,And Kingsley goes to Froude for history.'"

'Froude informs the Scottish youthThat parsons do not care for truth.The Reverend Canon Kingsley cries:History is a pack of lies.

What cause for judgments so malign?A brief reflection solves the mystery,Froude believes Kingsley's a divine,And Kingsley goes to Froude for history.'"

Long years ago my eye caught the title, "From Shakespeare to Pope," Gosse, and as I took down the book, I asked, "Well, what was there from Shakespeare to Pope?"—a question which the book answered so delightfully that I read it straight through twice, while the Critical Kit Kats is my particular joy in introducing to friendly books my young student readers, whom I send off armed with it, together with a volume of Fitzgerald, or Stevenson, or the Browning sonnets. Mr. Gosse has such a comfortable and intimate way of saying things that makes one feel it is one's own expression of one's own thoughts. I suppose most of us own to a pocket copy of Shakespeare's sonnets, wherein we have marked many a line, and then Mr. Gosse writes for us, as he sends the sonnets to a friend:

"This is the holy missal Shakespeare wrote,Then, on sad evenings when you think of me,Or when the morn seems blyth, yet I not near,Open this book, and read, and I shall beThe meter murmuring at your bended ear;I cannot write my love with Shakespeare's art,But the same burden weighs upon my heart."

Do your friendly books ever find each other out upon the shelves? After reading in Mary Cowden Clarke's "My long life," of her childish, reverent awe towards Keats and Shelley, who were often guests in her father's house, the book found its place next to those poets, and was it Keats who was sitting on the sofa when the same little girl crept up behind and kissed his hand just because she had heard he was a poet? Gilbert White's "Natural history of Selborne," much in the same way stands beside Lowell, in whose "Garden acquaintance," I first learned its "delightful charm of absolute leisure," and here too, when it leaves my study table, stands that dear big book which still claims my leisure hours, "Charles Eliot, landscape architect," one of those rare books with a subtle and unconscious autobiographic touch, when one chances upon the fact that the writer was Harvard's president, telling the story as the brief fore-note says,

"For the dear son,Who died in the bright prime—From the father."

But this is all very personal and my only hope is that while I am reading, you are following the example of my sometime youthful nephew, who, on being asked about the sermon one Sunday after church, answered, "Why really, Mamma, I don't know what it was about. I got tired listening, and withdrew my attention and went fishing."

Finally, although we are admonished not to put new wine into old bottles, there fortunately is no admonition against old wine in new bottles, and friendliness is certainly the richest of wine both in men and in books. Nor am I at all certain that in the last analysis it is not the supreme grace which makes possible that joy in life, without which we are of necessity cast into a limbo of outer darkness, and so I commend to you the best of old wine which ever lingers in The Friendly Book.

THE PRESIDENT: Our good old friend, Dr. Canfield, once told a story about a critic who after a life devoted to the gentle art of making enemies was gathered to his fathers. Those who had known him, and who had for the most part been recipients of his buffetings gathered about his bier, and compared notes and estimates of the special qualities which the late departed had possessed. Yes, said one, "he loved us so well that he chastised us frequently." True, said another, "he could never catch sight of one of us without administeringa vigorous kick." At this the eyelids of the deceased were seen to flutter a bit, and he sat bolt upright and his sepulchral voice made this response: "Yes, but I always kicked towards the goal."

Now perhaps this introduction may not seem to be a very happy preliminary to the paper about to be announced, and in some respects its application may not be evident, for certainly the speaker who is about to talk to us, on "How to discourage reading" is by no means a dead one. He has, however, been somewhat active in the kicking process—though always towards the goal. I present to you Mr. EDMUND L. PEARSON, of the Boston Transcript.

Mr. PEARSON: The president has very kindly referred to the fact that while I do not practice the profession of librarian, I tell other people how they ought to do it. He might have made use of a quotation or a sentence or two at the beginning of Mark Twain's "Puddin'head Wilson," only I fear that Mr. Legler was too courteous to use it. I have no hesitation in speaking of it myself. Mark Twain says of the Puddin'head Wilson maxims: "These maxims are for the instruction and moral elevation of youth. To be good is noble, but to tell others how to be good is nobler and much less trouble."

Mr. Pearson read the following paper:

When the "Five Foot Shelf" of books were published, three of my friends bought the set. One of them did so without any pretence that he was going to read them. He is a somewhat naïve young man, able to indulge his whims, and he said he thought that buying the books "would help out President Eliot." That is a very meritorious sentiment to hold toward the compilers or authors of books—I wish that there were more persons who felt that way. I have no fault to find with him, at all.

Nor have I any complaint to make against the other two men. Blame is not what they deserve, but commiseration. Like the girl in the song, they are "more to be pitied than censured." The price was a consideration with them, and they gave up their money for the sake of being forever cut off from all those tremendous "classics." For that is what it amounted to. One of these men has a very pretty office, with some nice bookshelves, painted white. He added to the books of his profession and some other works of general literature, this "Five Foot Shelf"—which occupies, I believe, about eighteen feet of shelf room. He tried to read one of the books—I know he did that, because he admitted it—and he confided to me that he thought it was silly.

The third man bought the "Five Foot Shelf," and announced his determination "to read the whole thing right through." He did this with set teeth, as if he might have said: "I'll read 'em if they kill me!" Well, he started one of them. He read a little in Franklin's "Autobiography." I know he did, because he told me about it. He and I belong to that irritating class of persons who get up early and take long walks before breakfast, and then take care to mention it later in the day, as if to cast discredit on other people. We have to go early, too, because we intersperse the walks with runs, and he has dignity to maintain, and it wouldn't do for him to dash about the streets after other people are up. While we walked, or dog-trotted, about the country roads he told me about the "Autobiography." But I have noticed that he has left the "Five Foot Shelf." I doubt if he even finished that first one of its volumes which he attempted. When he talks about books now, it is about the "History of the American people." He is a Democrat, and like many Democrats he has discovered that our history has been truly written only according to Mr. Woodrow Wilson.

Will any one of those three men ever readtwo wholevolumes from that set? It is doubtful—very doubtful. And their cases are, I believe, typical of thousands of others. And what is true of the "Five Foot Shelf" is true of a score of other collections—the Hundred Best Books, the Greatest Books of the Universe, the MostPonderous Volumes of the Ages, the Selected and Highly Recommended Classics of All Nations. There are dozens of them—you all know them—these "standard" sets and collections, in which learned and well-intentioned men have innocently conspired with publishers to discourage reading.

The "Five Foot Shelf" is not picked out for especial disapprobation. As a matter of fact, I suppose it is far better, far more human in its selections, far more readable in some of its titles than most of these sets of "great" books. But there is something about every one of these collections of classics that acts like a palsy upon the reading faculty. It is a little mysterious, rather hard to define, but that it exists I have no manner of doubt. It would be impossible to doubt, after seeing it demonstrated so many times.

Take, at random, the titles of five famous books—books which are apt to turn up in these sets or collections. Plato's "Republic," the "Odyssey," the "Morte D'Arthur," the "Anatomy of melancholy," and "Don Quixote." Take the average man, the man usually known as the "business" man. Suppose that he has not read any of these books in his school days—that he has reached the age of forty without reading them. Now, the chances are at least a hundred to one that heneverreads them. But let him buy one of the sets of thirty or forty volumes, in which these five books are included, and the chances against his reading any one of the five, instead of being diminished, are enormously increased. It is now certainly three hundred to one that he never reads any of the five books. There is something benumbing, something deadening, something stupefying, to the average man to take into his house six yards of solid "culture." And this I believe to be true as a general statement, in spite of instances which may be adduced here and there.

But, mind you, if this same man happens to have his attention called to one of the books—especially to either of the last two, as they are a little nearer the temper of our time—and if he gets one of them,by itself, there is now a fair probability that he may read at least part of it. Hemayeven finish it.

If he really wishes to read the so-called great books let him forever beware of acquiring one of those overwhelming lumps of literature—the publisher's delight and the book-agent's darling—known by some such name as the Colossal Classics of the World. They breed hypocrites and foster humbugs. He buys them andthinkshe is going to read them. They look ponderous and weighty and erudite upon his shelves—to the innocent. People exclaim: "My! What fine books you have!" He tries to smile a wise smile—to give the impression that they are the companions of his solitude, the consolation of his wakeful hours. He knows that these people won't ask if he has ever read any of them. They are afraid he might come back at them with: "Oh, yes, of course. Now, how doyoulike Milton's 'Areopagitica'?" After a time he begins to think hehasread them—because he has looked at the backs, and started to cut one or two of them. Then it is all up with him. He never even tries to read them again. They just stand there and occasionally make him a little uncomfortable.

Making friends with books, and especially with those famous books which require some concentration, is like making friends with people. You can not do it in a wholesale, yardstick manner. If they come into our lives at all, they come subtly, slowly, one at a time. If a man should walk into this room saying: "All my life I have been without friends, I have decided that I wish to have friends—I am going to adopt all of you, every one of you, as a friend, here and now!"—you know how an experiment like that would succeed. It is the same with books.

In the competition for the best method to discourage reading, the second prize should be awarded to that pestilential invention—the Complete Works of an author. There was a publisher—he still lives—who told one of his agents: "Books arenot made to read; they are made to sell." He was probably the inventor of that discourager of reading, the Complete Works.

If one of you wishes to keep a friend in total ignorance of any writer, there is an almost certain method—give him one of the sets of the Complete Works of that writer. It is a sure method to kill interest.

As in the case of the collections of classics, there is something wholesale and overpowering about such a set. It is thrown at your head, so to speak, in a chunk, and you never get over the blow. Imagine the case of a man who had never read Dickens. If he is wise, he goes at him one book at a time, he tests and he tries, and at the end of a few years he owns eight or ten books—well-thumbed books, that have been read, and that represent pleasure. But if he listens to the book-agent he contracts for a yard and a half of Dickens, and when it comes he gazes in despair at that rigid row of books—as unassailable as a regiment of Prussian grenadiers. That is the end of all intercourse between him and Charles Dickens.

"Oh, you might as well have them all," says the agent, "you needn't read the ones you don't like." That is what the waiter told the man when he brought him a breakfast-cup full of coffee, after dinner, instead of a demi-tasse: "You ain't got to drink all of it."

Miles upon miles of these sets of Complete Works are sold every year, and from one end of the land to the other, heads of families are sinking back comfortably upon their Morris chairs, and gazing in fatuous self-satisfaction at their bookcases, which they have just filled, at one swoop, with nine yards of the Complete Works of Scott, Cooper, Dumas, Dickens, and Thackeray.

"Look, Mother, we've got the bookcase filled up at last!" "Well, I am glad to see it! It was distressin' to see all those shelves so empty like."

Will they ever look at them? Never a look! It is even odds they do not cut the pages. Now that the noble art of pressing autumn leaves has gone out—you know how it was done, with wax and a hot flatiron, and then you put them between the pages of a book—now that pastime is forgotten, there isn't one remaining cause why those pages should ever be opened. The insides of those books will be the most secret place in that house henceforth. Talk about sliding panels and secret drawers in old writing-desks—they are open and conspicuous in comparison. They will be great for hiding places—I think I will write a melodrama and have the missing will turn up in the fifth act, sixty years later, hidden between page 1 and page 2 of one of the volumes in somebody's Complete Works.

For the third place in the list of best methods to discourage reading there are two competitors. They are so nearly tied that it is hard to choose between them. I am inclined to think that the honor should be awarded to the custom of setting up counsels of perfection in the matter of recommending the so-called "classics" to possible readers, of saying by word of mouth, or by printed page: "These are the great classics, the great books of the world" and adding, by implication, "If you don't like them, after making heroic attempts, then you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting."

This word "classics" covers a multitude of nuisances and perplexities. The "classics" include books which are still alive with humanity, which are delightful today to any person who is at all bookish, and they include books which are so utterly alien, so far removed from our time, place and habit of mind, that it is absolutely absurd to pretend that anyone in this year and land, except a few, a very few, specialists, can read them with any pleasure, or can read them at all, in fact, except under compulsion.

These lists of the great classics are too frequently compiled with a cowardly obedience to tradition. It matters a little what some great person of a hundred or a thousand years ago thought about a book—but it does not matter much. Recently, Isaw in a book a list of great persons who had been influenced by this or that book. Some book or other influenced Madame de Maintenon—what of it? Doubtless other books, far less desirable, influenced her, too, so what does it prove? The value of books, as a recent writer has pointed out, shifts and changes with the changing years. What may have been truly a great book a thousand years ago is not necessarily great today—no matter how many famous personages have embalmed it in their praise, and no matter how many other personages have praised it, not because they enjoyed it themselves, but because the earlier ones did. Such a book is interesting—to specialists—as a milestone in the history of literature, but it is not to be forced, however gently, upon the general reader as a book he "ought" to read.

Museums of art, like the Louvre, contain paintings which ignoramuses like myself look upon with astonishment. Mediæval pictures of the most hideous description—how came they in the same building with these other beautiful works of art? Is it possible that anyone is so silly as to pretend to admire them? And then the explanation dawns upon the ignoramus: they are here to illustrate the development of the art of painting. This is a museum, as well as a collection of beautiful things. No one who is honest pretends to enjoy their beauty. It is thus with books. A great collection of books may well contain those writings which seemed full of meaning to people two thousand years ago, but they are not to be held up—not all of them, at any rate—as books which anybody "ought" to read today. The significance of any work of literature, however noble, is a thing to ebb and flow, and finally to vanish altogether. Professor Barrett Wendell reminded me once that Shakespeare's plays and my daily themes would alike, one day, be dust and atoms in the void of the centuries—but I do not think that he meant unduly to compliment Shakespeare by this association.

Since it is always better to come down to tacks in speaking of books, I will mention some of the classics which have little significance today. It is always dangerous to do this—somebody is sure to hold up his hand and exclaim: "Why, I likethem, very much," or "I know an old gentleman who readsthat, every night before going to bed." But I will take the risk, and say that the Greek and French dramas of the classic periods are works of literature almost certain to appear on most of these lists of Best Books, and that it is almost sheer humbug to put them there. So few people can read them, there is so little reason—especially in the case of the French plays—why anyoneshouldread them, today, that their inclusion is a pitiful example of lack of courage. In the matter of the French drama I speak especially of Racine and Corneille—names almost certain to appear on these lists of the classics. Someone will relate the story about Napoleon saying that if Racine (or was it Corneille?) had lived in his time, he would have made him a marshal. Then some of his plays are smugly entered upon the list. With their stiff, set speeches, their ridiculous unbosomings of the leading characters of their "confidantes," they are as out of place in our life as were their Caesars, Alexanders, and Pompeys, teetering about the stage in high-heeled shoes, ruffles, wigs, and all the rest of the costume of Louis XIV.

It is good to recommend the classics, but it must not be forgotten that there are classics, and classics. There should be independence, and an ability to look things in the face, to realize that a change has come, when it is already here. Why should the people who deal with books let the politicians get ahead of them? There is a bright, clean air blowing through the nation, and those who worship fusty precedent are correspondingly unhappy. We have a president who cares not a rap for mouldy and senseless traditions—he has learned well the lesson taught him by one of his predecessors. If President Wilson has the courage to point out that the final authority on matters of factory legislation and mine inspection in the year 1913 is not necessarily Thomas Jefferson, is it not possible for the critics and choosers of books to understand that Dr. Johnson and Madame de Maintenon have not uttered the last word about literature? There might and should be a "new freedom" of literary criticism—not yesterday, nor today, nor tomorrow, but all the time.

Here is another way to discourage reading. You can do it by giving a man one of these over-annotated editions of a book. I mean a book which has so many footnotes that the text is crowded right out of bed; a book in which the editor is so pleased with himself for discovering that the father of Lady Hester Somebody (who is mentioned in the text) was born in 1718 and died in 1789 that he simply has not the decent manners to keep his useless knowledge to himself. No; he must tell it to you, even though he elbows the author—a better man than himself—out of the way to do it.

One of the best books of its kind—I speak under correction—is George Birkbeck Hill's edition of Boswell's "Johnson." It is, I believe, correct, and scholarly; it certainly represents a vast amount of labor, and it is "very valuable for reference." Also it is admirably arranged for driving a reader away from Boswell forever. It is positively exasperating to see page after page on which Boswell occupies two lines at the top, and Dr. Hill takes up all the rest of the room. Sometimes he takes up the whole page! Yet that edition is recommended to readers by persons who ought to know better.

Other excellent examples—I am speaking only of much-praised books—are found in the Furness Variorum editions of Shakespeare. When one of these volumes appears it is usually greeted by a chorus of "Oh's!" and "Ah's!" as when a particularly gorgeous skyrocket goes up on Fourth of July night. Such scholarship! Such a boon to earnest Shakespeareans! Such labor! Such erudition! Well, a great deal of that praise is deserved—each volume is certainly a tour de force. But I wish to read you from a review of the latest of them—a review written for the Boston Herald, by Mr. John Macy, the author of that vigorous and sensible book, "The spirit of American literature." It deals with "The tragedie of Julius Caesar" edited by Horace Howard Furness, Jr. "This," writes Mr. Macy, "is the latest volume in 'A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare,' and is the first under the sole editorship of the late Dr. Furness' son. From an enormous mass of commentary, criticism, word-worrying, text-marring and learned guesswork, Mr. Furness has chosen what seem to him the best notes. The sanity of his introduction and the good sense of some of his own notes lead one to suppose that he has selected with discrimination from the notes of others. His work is a model of patience, industry and judgment. He plays well in this game of scholarship. But what is the game worth? What is the result?

"Here is a volume of nearly 500 large pages. The text is a literal reprint of the folio. The clear stream of poetry runs along the tops of the pages. Under that is a deposit of textual emendations full of clam-shells and lost anchors and tin cans. Under that is a mud bottom two centuries deep. It consists of (a) what scholars said Shakespeare said; (b) what scholars said Shakespeare meant; (c) what scholars said about what other scholars said; (d) what scholars said about the morality and character of the personages, as (1) they are in Shakespeare's play, and as (2) they are in other historical and fictitious writings; (e) what scholars said about how other people used the words that Shakespeare used; (f) what scholars said could be done to Shakespeare's text to make him a better poet. I have not read all those notes and I never shall read them. Life is too short and too interesting. All the time that I was trying to read the notes, so that I could know enough about them to write this article, my mind kept swimming up out of the mud into that clear river of text. It is a perfectly clear river. Some of the obscurities that scholars sayare there are simply not obscure, except as poetry ought to have a kind of obscurity in some turbulent passages. Some of the obscurities the scholars put there in their innocence and stupidity, and those obscurities you can eliminate by blandly ignoring them."

These learned and over-annotated editions—they are not intended, you say, for the casual reader. Yet they get into his hand—they are, sometimes recommended to him. And, as Mr. Macy asks, are they worth the labor they have cost—are they worth it toanybody? Looking at them reminds me of the ideal ascetic of the Middle Ages, St. Simeon Stylites. St. Simeon was considered the most religious man of his time because for twenty years he lived upon a pillar that "numbered forty cubits from the soil," and because he would

"'Tween the spring and downfall of the light,Bow down one thousand and two hundred times,To Christ, the Virgin Mother, and the Saints."

In spite of that, St. Simeon is not the ideal religious man today. Will these fact-collectors be the ideal scholars a century hence?

Are we sometimes acclaiming as great scholars men who are really doing nothing but a tremendous amount of grubbing? Are some of the so-called scholarly editions really scholarly, or are they simply gigantic "stunts?" Whatever may be their value for reference, and that is vastly over-rated, they discourage reading.

It is also possible to drive people away from books, or make it difficult for them to get near books, by printing confusing things about them. It is possible to catalog a book—according to the best rules—in such a fashion as to make it an exceedingly unattractive, not to say repellant object. This is bad enough when it is done in the formal catalog, but when it is done in little leaflets, and book-lists—things which ought to be informal and inviting—the case is very sad. The other day I saw an entry in a book-list which read like this: "Dickens. Whipple, E. P. Charles Dickens." The expert is in no doubt; the uninitiated may well be confused to know which is the author and which the subject. When someone defends such practices by saying: "But the rules!" someone else, whose voice is a voice of authority ought to say: "Fudge! And also Fiddle-de-dee!"

The general subject today is "the World of Books." It is a delightful world—one so different from that into which we emerge every morning that it seems hard, sometimes, to realize that the one exists inside the other. It is a place of entertainment within the reach of any of us. There are a few obstructions around the entrance—some of which I have tried to describe. People have built up walls of impossible "classics"; publishers have tried to string a barbed-wire fence of Complete Works around it. Pedants stand outside, calling upon you to swallow a couple of gallons of facts before you go into the great tent. You can walk by them all. Inside, everything is pleasant. Over in one corner are the folk who like to play with first editions, unique copies, unopened copies, and all the rest of those expensive toys. Some of these gentlemen have about as much to do with the world of books as have the collectors of four-post beds and old blue china, but many of them are very good fellows. Most of them do not belong in here at all, but, like boys who have crawled in under the tent, now they are inside they think they have as much right as anybody. Some of them, indeed, are quite uppish and superior, and inclined to look down on the rest of us who have a vulgar notion that books are made toread.

Here is all you require—a comfortable chair, and a pipe. And the company! Well, look around:

Dear Lamb and excellent Montaigne,Sterne and the credible Defoe,Borrow, DeQuincey, the great Dean,The sturdy leisurist Thoreau;The furtive soul whose dark romance,By ghostly door and haunted stair,Explored the dusty human heart,And the forgotten garrets there;The moralist it could not spoil,To hold an empire in his hands;Sir Walter, and the brood who sprang,From Homer through a hundred lands,Singers of songs on all men's lips,Tellers of tales in all men's ears,Movers of hearts that still must beat,To sorrows feigned and fabled tears.

Dear Lamb and excellent Montaigne,Sterne and the credible Defoe,Borrow, DeQuincey, the great Dean,The sturdy leisurist Thoreau;

The furtive soul whose dark romance,By ghostly door and haunted stair,Explored the dusty human heart,And the forgotten garrets there;

The moralist it could not spoil,To hold an empire in his hands;Sir Walter, and the brood who sprang,From Homer through a hundred lands,

Singers of songs on all men's lips,Tellers of tales in all men's ears,Movers of hearts that still must beat,To sorrows feigned and fabled tears.

At the conclusion of Mr. Pearson's paper a book symposium was conducted in which the following members of the Association briefly discussed the respective books here indicated:

Hine. Modern organization. Reviewed by Paul Blackwelder.Crispi's Memoirs and the recent literature of the Risorgimento. Reviewed by Bernard C. Steiner.Goldmark. Fatigue and efficiency. Reviewed by Katherine T. Wootten.Tarbell. The business of being a woman. Reviewed by Pearl I. Field.Antin. The promised land. Reviewed by Althea H. Warren.Brieux. La femme seule. Reviewed by Corinne Bacon.The great analysis. Reviewed by Josephine A. Rathbone.Weyl. The great democracy. Reviewed by Frank K. Walter.

Hine. Modern organization. Reviewed by Paul Blackwelder.

Crispi's Memoirs and the recent literature of the Risorgimento. Reviewed by Bernard C. Steiner.

Goldmark. Fatigue and efficiency. Reviewed by Katherine T. Wootten.

Tarbell. The business of being a woman. Reviewed by Pearl I. Field.

Antin. The promised land. Reviewed by Althea H. Warren.

Brieux. La femme seule. Reviewed by Corinne Bacon.

The great analysis. Reviewed by Josephine A. Rathbone.

Weyl. The great democracy. Reviewed by Frank K. Walter.

The PRESIDENT: Before inducting into office the president-elect I shall ask the secretary whether there are any announcements to be made or if any new business is to come up at this time? Is there any business for the Council to consider?

Dr. ANDREWS: There are some resolutions from the Documents Round Table to come before the Council and perhaps other routine work.

The PRESIDENT: They will be referred to the Council. We will receive the report of the tellers concerning the election.

The SECRETARY: The report of the tellers states that you have elected as your officers for the coming year the following persons:

FORREST B. SPAULDING,JOHN F. PHELAN,Tellers of Election.

The PRESIDENT: You have heard the result of the election. I shall ask Mr. Gardner M. Jones and Mr. Harrison W. Craver to show the president-elect the way to the platform.

(The committee escorted Mr. Anderson to the platform.)

Mr. President-elect, it is with special personal satisfaction that I have announced to you the result unanimously made by this conference in choosing you to the honorable position of president. I am personally gratified in that you represent, I think, so splendidly many of the elementswhich have been talked about during this meeting. You are yourself a graduate of a library school, yet you have sympathy with those who have not attained to that distinction. You have been associated with a great scientific library, you have been in charge of a medium-sized library and are now at the head of the largest public library in the world; and yet many of us have had evidences that you have the deepest and warmest sympathy for the small and struggling library, no matter where it may be.

Mr. President-elect, the retiring board of officers received this gavel not as an emblem of authority, but as a symbol of service. As such we commit it to your care for the next year.

For the retiring board of officers I may say, in the words of Wynken DeWorde in one of his colophons, "And now we make an end. If we have done well, we have done that which we would have desired; and if but meanly and slenderly, we yet have done that which we could attain unto."

The wish goes from the ex-president to the president that the most successful administration in the history of the Association may be the one which is about to begin.

(Mr. Legler then handed the gavel to Mr. Anderson and retired from the platform.)

PRESIDENT ANDERSON: Ladies and gentlemen, fellow members of the Association: In the first place, I want to express my heartfelt thanks for the gracious things the retiring president has just been pleased to say concerning my humble self. Furthermore, I have to thank him for giving me an opportunity to correct a mistake which has been current in this Association for some twenty years, namely, that I am the graduate of a library school. I was at the Albany library school—more years ago than I care to tell—between seven and eight months. My money ran out and I had to get a job. I did not even complete the first year. That is a reflection on me, not upon the library school.

The exigencies of trains and luncheons would make it unfair if not cruel for me to detain you here this morning with a speech and I shall make none. But I want to beg you on this occasion to forget and forgive the disagreeable things said or done by the officers-elect in the heat of a bitter partisan campaign. (Laughter—There was no opposition ticket.)

Seriously, I want to express to you all, not merely for myself but for every member of the incoming executive board and the incoming members of the Council, our appreciation of the honor you have conferred upon us and of the responsibilities you have placed upon our shoulders. We can only hope to maintain—and it will require a struggle and great and arduous work on our part to maintain—the high standard set by our predecessors. I thank you.

If there is nothing further to come before us the Conference will stand adjourned.

ADJOURNED SINE DIE.

Meeting called to order by President Legler. Other members present were Miss Eastman, Messrs. Anderson, Andrews, Putnam and Wellman.

Several matters of routine business were transacted, including the reception and adoption of the report of the Committee on Nominations.

Upon motion of Mr. Anderson, seconded by Dr. Putnam, Mrs. H. L. Elmendorf was elected member of the Publishing Board to succeed herself for a term of three years.

In behalf of the Committee on International Relations, Dr. Putnam reported that with such information as it had been able to gather the committee felt unable tomake any affirmative recommendation as to participation by the American Library Association in the proposed Exposition of the Book and Graphic Arts at Leipzig in 1914.

Adjourned.

Meeting of June 28th

Present: President Anderson, Miss Eastman, Messrs. Andrews, Wellman and Craver.

Mr. Wellman presented his resignation as non-official member in view of his election to the office of first vice-president, which, upon motion of Dr. Andrews, was accepted.

Upon motion of Mr. Craver, it was unanimously voted that W. N. C. Carlton be elected to the Executive Board to fill the unexpired term of Mr. Wellman. Mr. Carlton was called to the meeting and took his place as a member of the Board.

A meeting place for 1914 was next considered. Miss Edith A. Phelps, librarian of the Carnegie library of Oklahoma City, appeared before the board and invited the Association to meet in Oklahoma City, her invitation being seconded by the Oklahoma Library Association and other organizations of the State. Invitations were received also by letter from the convention bureaus of New Orleans, Nashville, Wilmington, Del., Milwaukee, and other places. After informal discussion it was voted that the Secretary be instructed to investigate facilities for holding the conference at Madison, Wis., and if, in the opinion of the president and secretary, conditions at Madison are not favorable for a meeting, that Mackinac and Ottawa Beach be investigated in the order here named.

Invitations from the authorities of the Panama-Pacific Exposition to hold the conference at San Francisco in 1915 were read and from the California Library Association to the same effect, Mr. Everett R. Perry, of Los Angeles, bearing the invitation from the latter association. Invitations were also received from the library authorities of Seattle, seconded by the business organizations of that city and by the convention bureaus of other cities of the Pacific Northwest. It was voted to refer this information to the next Executive Board.

Mr. William Stetson Merrill presented the following report in behalf of the Committee on code for classifiers, which, upon motion, was accepted as a report of progress, and the request for an appropriation of $20 referred to the meeting of the Executive Board in January.

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