nce and listen with thrills to the silliest stuff purporting to
proceed from Plato or Daniel Webster or Abraham Lincoln, when in the
Public Library, a few blocks away are important and authentic messages
from those same persons, to which they have never given heed. Such a
message derives interest and significance from circumstances outside
itself. Very few books create their own atmosphere unaided. They
presuppose a system of abilities, opinions, prejudices, likes and
dislikes, intellectual connections and what not, that is little less than
appalling, if we try to follow it up. Dislike of books or indifference
toward them is often simply the result of a lack of these things or of
some component part of them. We must supply what is lacking if we are to
arouse a desire for books in those who do not yet possess it. I say that
such a labor is difficult enough to interest him whose pleasure it is to
essay hard tasks; it is noble enough to attract him who loves his
fellow-man; success in it is rare enough and glorious enough to stimulate
him who likes to succeed where others have failed. Advertising may be good
or bad, noble or ignoble, right or wrong, according to what is advertised
and our methods of advertising it. He who would scorn to announce the
curative powers of bottled spring-water and pink aniline dye; he who
regards it as a commonplace task to urge upon the spendthrift public the
purchase of unnecessary gloves and neckties, may well feel a thrill of
satisfaction and of anticipation in the task of advertising ideas and of
persuading the unheeding citizen to appropriate what he has been
accustomed to view with indifference.

To get at the root of the matter, let us inquire why it is that so many
persons do not care for books. We may divide them, I think, into two
classes--those who do not care, or appear not to care for ideas at all,
whether stored in books or not; and those who do care for ideas but who
either do not easily get them out of storage or do not realize that they
can be and are stored in books. Absolute carelessness of ideas is, it
seems to me, rather apparent than real. It exists only in the idiot. There
are those to be sure that care about a very limited range of ideas; but
about some ideas they always care.

We must, in our advertisement of ideas, bear this in mind--the necessity
of offering to each that which he considers it worth his while to take. If
I were asked what is the most fundamentally int