After a while 25c books may be sold, and with practice and hard study 50c books will sell readily. This question is more fully dealt with in the next chapter.
About two different books may be sold effectively at the meeting; one early in the meeting and the other about the close. The closing book talk however, should be begun while the meeting is at its full strength.
One street meeting that puts ten to twenty dollars worth of good books into circulation is worth a dozen where the only result is the remembrance of what the speaker said.
CHAPTER XX
BOOK-SELLING AT MEETINGS
The tones of the speaker’s voice fade away and are forever lost. Too often the ideas which the voice proclaimed drift into the background and presently disappear. This is the crowning limitation of public speaking. The lecturer should be, first of all, an educator, and his work should not be “writ in water.” The lazy lecturer who imagines that his duties to his audience end with his peroration is unfaithful to his great calling. Lazy lecturers are not very numerous as they are certain of a career curtailed from lack of an audience.
There are some lecturers, however, who see nothing of importance in their work except the delivering of their lectures. And the educational value of such workers is only a fraction of what it might be. Life is not so long for the strongest of us, nor are the results that can be achieved by the most gifted such that we can afford to waste the best of our opportunities. This article is not intended as a sermon, but if as lecturers we are to be educators we must not neglect to use the greatest weapons against ignorance in the educational armory—books.
The books here referred to are not the volumes in the lecturer’s own library. They, of course, are indispensable. There have been men who felt destined to be lecturers without the use of mere “book learning,” but they never lived long enough to find out why the public did not take them at their own estimate.
The man who undertakes to deal with a subject without first reading, and as far as possible, mastering, the best books on that subject, would no more be a lecturer than a man who tried to cut a field of wheat with a pocket-knife would be a farmer.
Any good lecture of an hour and a quarter has meant ten to fifty hours’ hard reading. There is much in the reading that cannot possibly appear in the lecture. Another lecture on a related theme or one widely different, has probably suggested itself. I remember while rummaging in history to find proofs and illustrations of “The Materialistic Conception of History,” which conception I was to defend presently in a public debate, gathering the scheme of a course of four lectures on the significance of the great voyages of the middle ages—a course which proved very successful when delivered about a month later.