the line to love it--would not read it
himself.

Any training in the use of books that does not base its whole method of
rousing the instinct of curiosity, and keeping it aroused, is a
wholesale slaughter, not only of the minds that might live in the books,
but of the books themselves. To ignore the central curiosity of a
child's life, his natural power of self-discovery in books, is to
dispense with the force of gravity in books, instead of taking advantage
of it.

The Third Interference: The Unpopularity of the First Person Singular

I

The First Person a Necessary Evil

Great emphasis is being laid at the present time upon the tools that
readers ought to have to do their reading with. We seem to be living in
a reference-book age. Whatever else may be claimed for our own special
generation it stands out as having one inspiration that is quite its
own--the inspiration of conveniences. That these conveniences have their
place, that one ought to have the best of them there can be no doubt,
but it is very important to bear in mind, particularly in the present
public mood, that if one cannot have all of these conveniences, or even
the best of them, the one absolutely necessary reference book in reading
the masters of literature is one that every man has.

It is something of a commonplace--a rather modest volume with most of
us, summed up on a tombstone generally, easily enough, but we are bound
to believe after all is said and done that the great masterpiece among
reference books, for every man,--the one originally intended by the
Creator for every man to use,--is the reference book of his own life. We
believe that the one direct and necessary thing for a man to do, if he
is going to be a good reader, is to make, this reference book--his own
private edition of it--as large and complete as possible. Everything
refers to it, whatever his reading is. Shakespeare and the New York
_World_, Homer and _Harper's Bazar_, Victor Hugo and _The Forum_,
_Babyhood_ and the Bible all refer to it,--are all alike in making their
references (when they are really looked up) to private editions. Other
editions do not work. In proportion as they are powerful in modern life,
all the books and papers that we have are engaged in the business of
going about the world discovering people to themselves, unroofing first
person singulars in it, getting people to use their own reference books
on all life. Literature is a kind of vast inte