THE COMPANIONSHIP OF BOOKS[5]

[5] Read before the Pacific Northwest Library Association,
June, 1910.


Are books fitted to be our companions? That depends. You and I read them
with pleasure; others do not care for them; to some the reading of any
book at all is as impossible as the perusal of a volume in Old Slavonic
would be to most of us. These people simply do not read at all. To a
suggestion that he supplement his usual vacation sports by reading a
novel, a New York police captain--a man with a common school
education--replied, "Well, I've never read a book yet, and I don't think
I'll begin now." Here was a man who had never read a book, who had no use
for books, and who could get along perfectly well without them. He is not
a unique type. Hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens might as well
be quite illiterate, so far as the use that they make of their ability to
read is concerned. These persons are not all uneducated; they possess and
are still acquiring much knowledge, but since leaving school they have
acquired it chiefly by personal experience and by word of mouth. Is it
possible that they are right? May it be that to read books is unnecessary
and superfluous?

There has been some effort of late to depreciate the book--to insist on
its inadequacy and on the impracticality of the knowledge that it conveys.
"Book-learning" has always been derided more or less by so-called
"practical men". A recent series of comic pictures in the newspapers makes
this clear. It is about "Book-taught Bilkins". Bilkins tries to do
everything by a book. He raises vegetables, builds furniture, runs a
chicken farm, all by the directions contained in books, and meets with