r
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 of literature put together. The library that is able to
show a fiction percentage of 60, points to it with pride, while there are
plenty with percentages between 70 and 80. Now this is all to the credit
of the fiction writers. I refuse to believe that their readers are any
more fundamentally interested in the subjects of which they treat