Books and how to make the most of them

BY JAMES HOSMER PENNIMAN
C. W. BARDEEN, PUBLISHER Syracuse, N. Y.
Copyright, 1911, by C. W. Bardeen
There is probably no subject on which there has been more advice given than on that of books and reading, but there are few upon which advice is more necessary, for even so wise a man as Goethe said, “I have been fifty years trying to learn how to read, and I have not learned yet.”
Books and How to Make the Most of Them
A book is a miracle wrought by human agency. What more wonderful than that the thought of a lifetime should be made visible and concentrated so as to be carried in the pocket; that black lines and dots upon a white page should bring before our minds the most beautiful images. More remarkable than the telegraph or the telephone, a book not only annihilates space but time, and carries the voice of David or Homer across the seas of the ages.
The miracle of the widow’s cruse finds its literal realization in a book. We may take all we can from it but there is just as much left for others with the sole limitation that he gets the most from books who has the most knowledge; to him that hath is given.
No other property is so peculiarly our own as our intellectual possessions. They are always with us; no reversal of fortune can deprive us of them. If we share our knowledge with another we still have it, and perhaps in a more orderly and useful form as the result of contact with a different mind, and the belief in the immortality of the soul makes us sure that our mental acquisitions are taken with us beyond the grave. Education and culture would be of small value if they were to be terminated by the expiration of a few short years of life. Books are the only work of man that may be said to be omniscient. They are the stored-up memory of the race. As all our experience of life would vanish without memory, so all accurate knowledge of mankind would evaporate without books and we should have nothing to depend upon but tradition.