Next we find those who understand how to read and to read with ease, but to whom books—­at any rate certain classes of books—­are not interesting.  Now interest in a subject may be so great that one will wade through the driest literature about it, but such interest belongs to the few—­not to the many.  I have come to the conclusion that more readers have had their interest killed or lessened by books than have had it aroused or stimulated.  This is a proportion that it is our business as librarians to reverse.  More of this unfortunate and heart-breaking, interest-killing work than I like to think of goes on in school.  Not necessarily; for the name of those is legion who have had their eyes opened to the beauties of literature by good teachers.  This makes it all the more maddening when we think how many poor teachers, or good teachers with mistaken methods, or indifferent teachers, have succeeded in associating with books in the minds of their pupils simply burdensome tasks—­the gloom and heaviness of life rather than its joy and lightness.  Such boys and girls will no more touch a book after leaving school than you or I would touch a scorpion after one had stung us.

Perhaps it is useless to try to change this; possibly it is none of our business, though we have already seen that there are reasons to the contrary.  But we can better matters, and we are daily bettering them, by our work with children.  If a child has once learned to love books and to associate them powerfully with something else than a burdensome task, then the labors of the unskillful teachers will create no dislike of the book but only of the teacher and his methods; while those of the good teacher will be a thousand times more fruitful than otherwise.

So much for the ways in which interesting books are sometimes made uninteresting.  Now for the books that are uninteresting per se—­and how many there are!  When a man has something to distribute commercially for personal gain, the thing that he tries above all to do is to interest his public—­to make them want what he has to sell.  His success or failure in doing this, means the success or failure of his whole enterprise.  He does not decide what kind of an entertainment his clients ought to attend and then try to make them go to it, or what kind of neckties they ought to wear and then try to make them wear them.  Of ten promoters, if nine proceeded on this principle and one on the plan of offering something attractive and interesting, who would succeed?  It is one of the marvels of all time that this never seems to have occurred to writers of books.  We are almost forced to conclude that they do not care whether their volumes are read or not.  In only one class of books, as a rule, do the writers endeavor to interest the reader first and foremost; you all know that I refer to fiction.  What is the result?  The writers of fiction are the ones read by the public.  More fiction is read, as you very well know, than all the other classes