The facts are peculiarly hard to get at. At first sight there would seem to be no way to find out whether the books that our libraries circulate have been read through from cover to cover, or only half through, or not at all. To be sure, each borrower might be questioned on the subject as he returned his book, but this method, would be resented as inquisitorial, and after all there would be no certainty that the data so gathered were true. By counting the stamps on the library book-card or dating-slip we can tell how many times a book has been borrowed, but this gives us no information about whether it has or has not been read. Fortunately for our present purpose, however, many works are published in a series of volumes, each of which is charged separately, and an examination of the different slips will tell us whether or not the whole work has been read through by all those who borrowed it. If, for instance in a two-volume work each volume has gone out twenty times, twenty borrowers either have read it through or have stopped somewhere in the second volume, while if the first volume is charged twenty times and the second only fourteen, it is certain that six of those who took out the first volume did not get as far as the second. In works of more than two volumes we can tell with still greater accuracy at what point the reader’s interest was insufficient to carry him further.
Such an investigation has been made of all works in more than one volume contained in seven branches of the Brooklyn Public Library, and with very few exceptions it has been found that each successive volume in a series has been read by fewer persons than the one immediately preceding. What is true of books in more than one volume is presumably also true, although perhaps in a less degree, of one-volume works, although we have no means of showing it directly. Among the readers of every book, then, there are generally some who, for one reason or other, do not read it to the end. Our question, “Do readers read?” is thus answered in the negative for a large number of cases. The supplementary question, “Why do not readers read?” occurs at once, but an attempt to answer it would take us rather too deeply into psychology. Whether this tendency to leave the latter part of books unread is increasing or not we can tell only by repeating the present investigation at intervals of a year or more. The probability is that it is due to pure lack of interest. For some reason or other, many persons begin to read books that fail to hold their attention. In a large number of cases this is doubtless due to a feeling that one “ought to read” certain books and certain classes of books. A sense of duty carries the reader part way through his task, but he weakens before he has finished it.
This shows how necessary it is to stimulate one’s general interest in a subject before advising him to read a book that is not itself calculated to arouse and sustain that interest. Possibly the modern newspaper habit, with its encouragement of slipshod reading, may play its part in producing the general result, and doubtless a careful detailed investigation would reveal still other partial causes, but the chief and determining cause must be lack of interest. And it is to be feared that instead of taking measures to arouse a permanent interest in good literature, which would in itself lead to the reading of standard works and would sustain the reader until he had finished his task, we have often tried to replace such an interest by a fictitious and temporary stimulus, due to appeals to duty, or to that vague and confused idea that one should “improve one’s mind,” unaccompanied by any definite plan of ways and means. There is no more powerful moral motor than duty, but it loses its force when we try to apply it to cases that lie without the province of ethics. The man who has no permanent interest in historical literature, and who is impelled to begin a six-volume history because he conceives it to be his “duty” to read it, is apt to conclude, before he has finished the second volume, that his is a case where inclination (or in this instance disinclination) is the proper guide.
As a matter of fact, the formation of a cultivated and permanent taste for good reading is generally a matter of lifelong education. It must be begun when the child reads his first book. An encouraging sign for the future is the care that is now taken in all good libraries to supervise the reading of children and to provide for them special quarters and facilities. A somewhat disheartening circumstance, on the other hand, is the multiplication of annotated and abbreviated children’s editions of all sorts of works that were read by the last generation of children without any such treatment. This kind of boned chicken may be very well for the mental invalid, but the ordinary child prefers to separate his meat from the “drumstick” by his own unaided effort, and there is no doubt that it is better for him to do so.
In the following table, the average circulation of first volumes, second volumes, etc., is given for each of seven classes of works. The falling off from volume to volume is noticeable in each class. It is most marked in science, and least so, as might be expected, in fiction. Yet it is remarkable that there should be any falling off at all in fiction. The record shows that the proportion of readers who cannot even read to the end of a novel is relatively large. These are doubtless the good people who speak of Dickens as “solid reading” and who regard Thackeray with as remote an eye as they do Gibbon. For such “The Duchess” furnishes good mental pabulum, and Miss Corelli provides flights into the loftier regions of philosophy.
| CLASS | Vol. I. | Vol. II. | Vol. III. | Vol. IV. | Vol. V. | Vol. VI. | Vol. VII. | Vol. VIII. | Vol. IX. | Vol. X. | Vol. XI. | Vol. XII. |
| History | 10.1 | 6.9 | 4.9 | 4.4 | 4.6 | 4.3 | 2.5 | 2.8 | 1.0 | 0.5 | 1.0 | 3.0 |
| Biography | 7.2 | 5.1 | 3.0 | 2.3 | 1.6 | 1.0 | 1.6 | 1.2 | 1.0 | 2. | ||
| Travel | 9.2 | 7.9 | ||||||||||
| Literature | 7.3 | 5.9 | 3.5 | 3.8 | 5.3 | 6.6 | 19.0 | 15.0 | 21.0 | |||
| Arts | 4.7 | 3.7 | 3.0 | |||||||||
| Sciences | 5.2 | 2.7 | 1.5 | |||||||||
| Fiction | 22.0 | 18.9 | 15.8 | 16. | 26. | 16. |
The figures in the table, as has been stated, are averages, and the number of cases averaged decreases rapidly as we reach the later volumes, because, of course, the number of works that run beyond four or five volumes is relatively small. Hence the figures for the higher volumes are irregular. Any volume may have been withdrawn separately for reference without any intention of reading its companions. Among the earlier volumes such use counts for little, owing to the large number of volumes averaged, while it may and does make the figures for the later volumes irregular. Thus, under History the high number in the twelfth column represents one-twelfth volume of Froude, which was taken out three times, evidently for separate reference, as the eleventh was withdrawn but once. Furthermore, apart from this irregularity, the figures for the later volumes are relatively large, for a work in many volumes is apt to be a standard, and although its use falls rapidly from start to finish enough readers persevere to the end to make the final averages compare unduly well with the initial ones where the high use of the same work is averaged in with smaller use of dozens of other first and second volumes. That the falling off from beginning to end in such long works is much more striking than would appear from the averages alone may be seen from the following records of separate works in numerous volumes:
| Vol. I. | Vol. II. | Vol. III. | Vol. IV. | Vol. V. | Vol. VI. | Vol. VII. | Vol. VIII. | Vol. IX. | Vol. X. | |
| HISTORY | ||||||||||
| Grote, “Greece” | 11 | 6 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Bancroft, “UnitedStates” | 22 | 10 | 6 | 8 | 10 | 8 | ||||
| Hume, “England” | 24 | 7 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 1 | ||||
| Gibbon, “Rome” | 38 | 12 | 7 | 3 | 4 | 6 | ||||
| Motley, “UnitedNetherlands” | 7 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||||||
| Prescott, “Ferdinand andIsabella” | 20 | 4 | 2 | |||||||
| Carlyle, “FrenchRevolution” | 18 | 10 | 8 | |||||||
| McCarthy, “Our OwnTimes” | 27 | 8 | 11 | |||||||
| BIOGRAPHY | ||||||||||
| Bourienne, “Memoirs ofNapoleon” | 19 | 18 | 9 | 7 | ||||||
| Longfellow’s“Life” | 6 | 4 | 2 | |||||||
| Nicolay and Hay,“Lincoln” | 6 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| Carlyle, “Frederick theGreat” | 7 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | |||||
| FICTION | ||||||||||
| Dumas, “Vicomte deBragelonne” | 31 | 30 | 24 | 22 | 21 | 16 | ||||
| Dumas, “Monte Cristo” | 27 | 17 | 18 | |||||||
| Dickens, “Our MutualFriend” | 5 | 4 | 1 | 0 | ||||||
| Stowe, “Uncle Tom’sCabin” | 37 | 24 |
Of course, these could be multiplied indefinitely. They are sufficiently interesting apart from all comment. One would hardly believe without direct evidence that of thirty-one persons who began one of Dumas’s romances scarcely half would read it to the end, or that not one of five persons who essayed Dickens’s “Mutual Friend” would succeed in getting through it.
Those who think that there can be no pathos in statistics are invited to ponder this table deeply. Can anyone think unmoved of those two dozen readers who, feeling impelled by desire for an intellectual stimulant to take up Hume, found therein a soporific instead and fell by the wayside?