A Librarians Open Shelf | Page 2

only once manage to read a book through; but
somehow I can't seem to do it." This boy had actually taken to his home
nearly a hundred books, returning each regularly and borrowing
another, without reading to the end of a single one of them.
That this case is not isolated and abnormal, but is typical of the way in
which a large class of readers treat books, there is, as we shall see, only
too much reason to believe.
The facts are peculiarly hard to get at. At first sight there would seem to
be no way to find out whether the books that our libraries circulate have
been read through from cover to cover, or only half through, or not at
all. To be sure, each borrower might be questioned on the subject as he
returned his book, but this method, would be resented as inquisitorial,
and after all there would be no certainty that the data so gathered were
true. By counting the stamps on the library book-card or dating-slip we
can tell how many times a book has been borrowed, but this gives us no
information about whether it has or has not been read. Fortunately for
our present purpose, however, many works are published in a series of
volumes, each of which is charged separately, and an examination of
the different slips will tell us whether or not the whole work has been
read through by all those who borrowed it. If, for instance in a
two-volume work each volume has gone out twenty times, twenty
borrowers either have read it through or have stopped somewhere in the
second volume, while if the first volume is charged twenty times and
the second only fourteen, it is certain that six of those who took out the
first volume did not get as far as the second. In works of more than two
volumes we can tell with still greater accuracy at what point the

reader's interest was insufficient to carry him further.
Such an investigation has been made of all works in more than one
volume contained in seven branches of the Brooklyn Public Library,
and with very few exceptions it has been found that each successive
volume in a series has been read by fewer persons than the one
immediately preceding. What is true of books in more than one volume
is presumably also true, although perhaps in a less degree, of
one-volume works, although we have no means of showing it directly.
Among the readers of every book, then, there are generally some who,
for one reason or other, do not read it to the end. Our question, "Do
readers read?" is thus answered in the negative for a large number of
cases. The supplementary question, "Why do not readers read?" occurs
at once, but an attempt to answer it would take us rather too deeply into
psychology. Whether this tendency to leave the latter part of books
unread is increasing or not we can tell only by repeating the present
investigation at intervals of a year or more. The probability is that it is
due to pure lack of interest. For some reason or other, many persons
begin to read books that fail to hold their attention. In a large number of
cases this is doubtless due to a feeling that one "ought to read" certain
books and certain classes of books. A sense of duty carries the reader
part way through his task, but he weakens before he has finished it.
This shows how necessary it is to stimulate one's general interest in a
subject before advising him to read a book that is not itself calculated
to arouse and sustain that interest. Possibly the modern newspaper habit,
with its encouragement of slipshod reading, may play its part in
producing the general result, and doubtless a careful detailed
investigation would reveal still other partial causes, but the chief and
determining cause must be lack of interest. And it is to be feared that
instead of taking measures to arouse a permanent interest in good
literature, which would in itself lead to the reading of standard works
and would sustain the reader until he had finished his task, we have
often tried to replace such an interest by a fictitious and temporary
stimulus, due to appeals to duty, or to that vague and confused idea that
one should "improve one's mind," unaccompanied by any definite plan
of ways and means. There is no more powerful moral motor than duty,
but it loses its force when we try to apply it to cases that lie without the
province of ethics. The man who has no permanent interest in historical

literature, and who is impelled to begin a six-volume history because he
conceives it to be his