Bookish America

FROM the standpoint of an American librarian busy in acquiring, cataloguing and distributing books, his country is naturally very bookish indeed, though there are doubtless points of view from which it might appear quite otherwise. We librarians frequently make the mistake of confounding the public in general with the part of it that makes use of public libraries. As a matter of fact this latter is not even “the reading public,” certainly not all of it; probably not even a typical cross section of it. This makes any conclusion drawn by librarians from their own statistics regarding the volume or quality of reading, subject to grave suspicion. What goes on in the way of reading outside of our institutions—in society libraries, in clubs, in millions of private houses,—we know only by hearsay or guess‐work.