conclusions by the accidental propinquity of phenomena
that have really nothing whatever to do with it.

* * * * *

Now in my group of a quarter of a million souls there is not a single shop
devoted wholly or principally to the sale of books. Not one. You might
discover a shop specializing in elephants or radium; but a real bookshop
does not exist. In a town of forty thousand inhabitants there will be a
couple of stationers, whose chief pride is that they are "steam printers"
or lithographers. Enter their shops, and you will see a few books.
Tennyson in gilt. Volumes of the Temple Classics or Everyman. Hymn-books,
Bibles. The latest cheap Shakespeare. Of new books no example except the
brothers Hocking. The stationer will tell you that there is no demand for
books; but that he can procure anything you specially want by return of
post. He will also tell you that on the whole he makes no profit out of
books; what trifle he captures on his meagre sales he loses on books
unsold. He may inform you that his rival has entirely ceased to stock
books of any sort, and that he alone stands for letters in the midst of
forty thousand people. In a town of sixty thousand there will be a
largeish stationer's with a small separate book department. Contents
similar to the other shop, with a fair selection of cheap reprints, and
half a dozen of the most notorious new novels, such as novels by Marie
Corelli, Max Pemberton, Mrs. Humphry Ward. That is all. Both the shops
described will have two or three regular book-buying clients, not more
than ten in a total of a hundred thousand. These ten are book-lovers.
They follow the book lists. They buy to the limit of their purses. And in
the cult of literature they keep themselves quite apart from the society
of the town, despising it. The town is simply aware that they are "great
readers."

* * * * *

Another agency for the radiation of light in the average town first
mentioned is the Municipal Free Library. The yearly sum spent on it is
entirely inadequate to keep it up to date. A fraction of its activity is
beneficial, as much to the artisan as to members of the crust. But the
chief result of the penny-in-the-pound rate is to supply women old and
young with outmoded, viciously respectable, viciously sentimental fiction.
A few new novels get into the Library every year. They must, however, be
"innocuous," that is to say, devoid of