nstance, there are more than ten
periodicals in the German language alone devoted exclusively to such a
narrow field as beekeeping. Such periodicals and such books we do not
call literature, any more than we do the labors of the man or woman who
supplies the text for Butterick's patterns. But they are printed matter,
and the reading of them takes up time that we might have spent upon
"books that are books."

But besides this bread and butter reading there is another sort that we
must admit into our lives if we are to be citizens of the world we live
in, contemporaries of our own age, men among the men of our time, and
that is reading for general information. The time has long since gone
by, to be sure, when any man could, like Lord Bacon, take all knowledge
for his province--we can hardly take a bird's-eye view of all knowledge
to-day. No amount of reading will ever produce another Scaliger, learned
in every subject. To be well informed, even in these days of the
banyan-like growth of the tree of knowledge, is to be a miracle of
erudition. Most of mankind must be content with the modest aim which Dr.
Holmes set for the poet, to know enough not to make too many blunders.
In carrying out this humble purpose, that of merely touching elbows with
the thronging multitude of facts of interest to the civilized man, we
have a task great enough to occupy the time of any reader, even if he
made it his vocation; and with most of us it must be only a minor
avocation. The very books about the books in this boundless field, the
compends of the compends, the reviews of the reviews, form in themselves
a library great enough to stagger human weakness. Besides all this--in a
sense a part of it, yet a miscellaneous and irrational part--come the
newspapers, with their daily distraction. This is after all our world,
and we cannot live in it and be absolute nonconformists. So we must
submit to the newspaper, though it makes a heavy addition to our daily
load of reading for information. But there is still another kind of
necessary reading that I wish to mention before we come to that which
ranks chief in importance.

The woman who takes out of the public or subscription library a novel a
day is only suffering from the perversion of an appetite that in its
normal state is beneficial. It is possible that her husband does not
read enough for amusement, that his horizon is narrowed, his sympathies
stunted by the lack of that very influence which,