The intellectual bonds between the library and the woman’s club have always been close.  Many libraries are the children of such clubs; many clubs have been formed in and by libraries.  If any mistakes are being made in the general policies and programmes of club reading, the librarian would naturally be the first to know it, and he ought to speak out.  He does know it, and his knowledge should become public property at once.  But, I repeat, although the trouble is conspicuous in connection with the reading of women’s clubs, it is far more general and deeply rooted than this.

The malady’s chief symptom, which is well known to all librarians, is a lack of correspondence between certain readers and the books that they choose.  Reading, like conversation, is the meeting of two minds.  If there is no contact, the process fails.  If the cogs on the gearwheels do not interact, the machine can not work.  If the reader of a book on algebra does not understand arithmetic; if he tackles a philosophical essay on the representative function without knowing what the phrase means; if he tries to read a French book without knowing the language, his mind is not fitted for contact with that of the writer, and the mental machinery will not move.

In the early days of the Open Shelf, before librarians had realised the necessity of copious assignments to “floor duty,” and before there were children’s librarians, I saw in a branch library a small child staggering under the weight of a volume of Schaff’s History of the Christian Church, which he had taken from the shelves and was presenting at the desk to be charged.  “You are not going to read that, are you?” said the desk assistant.

“It isn’t for me; it’s for me big brudder.”

“What did your big brother ask you to get?”

“Oh, a Physiology!”

Nowadays, our well-organised children’s rooms make such an occurrence doubtful with the little ones, but apparently there is much of it with adults.

Too much of our reading—­I should rather say our attempts at reading—­is of this character.  Such attempts are the result of a tendency to regard the printed page as a fetich—­to think that if one knows his alphabet and can call the printed words one after another as his eye runs along the line, some unexplained good will result, or at least that he has performed a praiseworthy act, has “accumulated merit” somehow or somewhere, like a Thibetan with his prayer-wheel.

It is probably a fact that if a man should meet you in the street and say, “In beatific repentance lies jejune responsibility,” you would stare at him and pass him by, or perhaps flee from him as from a lunatic; whereas if you saw these words printed in a book you might gravely study them to ascertain their meaning, or still worse, might succeed in reading your own meaning into them.  The words I have strung together happen to have no meaning, but the result would be the same if they meant something that was hidden from the reader by his inability to understand them, no matter what the cause of that inability might be.