k at will."

BOOKS AND LIFE

The influence of books on the community has been used in
this address by Dean (now President) Birge as a basis for
discussing their reaction on special groups, especially
those differentiated by age and sex, and how far the library
should be guided by it and take advantage of it. It is
perhaps the best general treatment of the group features of
socialized library work by a speaker of authority, not a
professional librarian.

Edward Asahel Birge was born at Troy, N.Y., Sept. 7, 1851,
graduated at Williams in 1873 and since 1875 has been a
member of the University of Wisconsin faculty, serving
successively as instructor in natural history, professor of
zoology, dean of the college of arts and sciences, acting
president, and finally in 1919, president of the University.
He has also served as a director of the Free Library at
Madison, and in 1906 was president of the Wisconsin Library
Association, before whom this address was delivered.

The aspect of the subject to which I would call your attention is the
often observed fact of the extent to which modern life in all of its
phases, is becoming based upon books. I say in all of its phases, for we
are concerned with the present extent of this relation between books and
life with its rapid increase, rather than with its existence. Ever since
the beginning of human society men have based their actions on the
teachings of experience. Part of these teachings each individual has
directly derived from his environment, and he has supplemented and
enlarged them by means of those coming from the remembered experience of
others, often belonging to an older generation. Later in history there
were added those teachings derived from books--from the recorded
experience of others. With that enlargement of the basis of human action
which comes from the remembered experience of others we, as librarians,
have nothing to do, and, indeed, there is little to say about it now
which could not have been said with equal propriety, one, two, or twenty
centuries ago. With books the case is different. The last century, the
last generation, the last decade--each has seen the transfer of the
basis of action from the oral to the printed word, which could be
paralleled by no other period of equal length in the history of
civilization. The story of this transfer from talk to print, from rule
of thum