The Home Reading Box Movement is a system of placing interesting, educational, and valuable reading matter at the disposal of the workers in an industrial organization. It consists of
1. A box in the plant in which the reading matter can be placed and kept until taken out by the workers.
2. Boxes in the homes of members of the organization or of the community interested, where reading matter intended for the plant can be kept until it is collected.
3. A system by which the reading matter gathered in the homes is taken to the plant reading box, is taken from the plant box to the homes of the workers, and, in turn, either returned to the plant or passed on to other homes which would have pleasure or profit from it.
The Box in the Plant.
The box in the plant is located at a place most convenient for the workers. Its size depends upon the size of the collections. It should be large enough to hold two collections of papers, magazines, and books. It should be located where the workers can get to it without loss of time and with fewest motions. The best place is usually near the path of exit after the day’s work. It will simplify the routing of the reading matter, if the box is put under a window next to the street, so that magazines can be put in by any one driving or walking by, without coming in and thereby possibly disturbing the operation of the plant. The box is made a regular part of the plant equipment by receiving a station number like every other “station” on the messenger’s route. The first box installed happened to be No. 34. All boxes since have received this number, and the same number becomes the home reading box symbol, thus,—“34.”
The Plant as a Source of Supply.
It is invariably a surprise to the management, as well as the workers, to find how much reading matter for the home reading box is available in the plant itself.
Every business man receives quantities of catalogs and other business and technical literature, and sample copies of publications, sent in the effort to get new subscribers. These are glanced at by the man receiving them, and then and there usually thrown into the waste-basket. A catalog is the best literary effort of the concern it represents, and usually contains valuable instruction. Now if the mail sorter or the purchasing department see no immediate need of the things in the catalog, it usually finds its way quickly to the waste-basket. That such catalogs have a decided interest to the users of the home reading box is shown by the fact that new catalogs are always taken away to the homes. The average manager has not the time to give each catalog the attention that it really deserves, but in the majority of cases there will be one or more men out in the plant who have both the time and interest to devote to the catalog. These usually discarded catalogs are sometimes read to see if they will not contain a thought for the “suggestion” box; the by-product being that the plant is kept up to date, so far as information contained in new catalogs is concerned. In the same way sample magazines or papers may come in, which make no particular appeal to the man to whom they are sent, or a magazine brings a marked article which is cut out and put on file,—the rest of the magazine being thrown into the waste-basket.
All of this usually discarded material can be, with profit, sent to the home reading box. The man in the office, who looks at and discards it, simply stamps or writes on it “34,” the symbol of the home reading box, or the number of its station in the inter-office postal system, and puts it in his “out” basket. On his next trip for distributing papers, the messenger takes the reading matter marked “34” from the “out” baskets, and deposits it in “34,” the home reading box.