All these things the self-respecting citizen should know.  But beyond and above all this there is the final economic service of advertising—­the causing a man to want that which he needs but does not yet desire.  Every man, woman and child in every town and village needs books in some shape, degree, form or substance.  And yet the proportion of those who desire them is yet outrageously small, though encouragingly on the increase.  Here no memorizing of a formula, even could we compass it, could suffice.  This kind of advertising means the realization of something lacking in a life.  Is the awakening of such a realization too much for us?  Are we to stand by and see our neighbors all about us awakening to the undoubted fact that they need telephones in their houses, and electric runabouts, and mechanical fans in hot weather, and pianolas, and new kinds of breakfast food, while we despair of awakening them to their needs of books—­quite as undoubted?  Are we to admit that personal gain, which was the victorious motive that spurred on the commercial advertisers in these and countless other instances, is to be counted more mighty than the desire to do a service to our fellowmen and to fulfill the duties of our positions—­which should spur us on?

I am not foolish enough to suppose that by placarding the fences with the words “Books!  Books!” as the patent medicine man does with “Curoline!  Curoline!” we shall make any progress.  The patent medicine man is right; he wants to excite curiosity and familiarize the public with the name of his nostrum.  They all know what a book is—­and alas the name is not even unknown and mysterious—­would that it were!  It calls up in many minds associations which, if we are to be successful we must combat, overthrow, and replace by others.  To many—­sad it is to say it—­a book is an abhorrent thing; to more still, it is a thing of absolute indifference.  To some a book is merely a collection of things, having no ascertainable relationships, that one is required to memorize; to others it is a collection of statements, difficult to understand, out of which the meaning must be extracted by hard study; to very few indeed does the book appear to be what it really is—­a message from another mind.  People will go to a seance and listen with thrills to the silliest stuff purporting to proceed from Plato or Daniel Webster or Abraham Lincoln, when in the Public Library, a few blocks away are important and authentic messages from those same persons, to which they have never given heed.  Such a message derives interest and significance from circumstances outside itself.  Very few books create their own atmosphere unaided.  They presuppose a system of abilities, opinions, prejudices, likes and dislikes, intellectual connections and what not, that is little less than appalling, if we try to follow it up.  Dislike of books or indifference toward them is often simply the result of a lack of these things or of some component part of them.  We