“Oh, but we get hardly any magazines. Let me see. We do take the Saturday Evening Post, and my wife reads the Home Journal and the Woman’s Home Companion, and I buy some of the weeklies and some of the monthlies.”
“And you get trade catalogs and trade papers of various kinds besides?”
“Oh, yes, we get some of those that pertain to our business.”
“Well, what do you do with them all, when you have finished reading them?”
“Why, we throw the advertising matter into the waste-basket, and the trade papers we keep with the idea of binding some day, but we never have bound them. I don’t know exactly what does become of them. I don’t think we ever really look at the old ones.”
It is this reading matter that we desire to send promptly into some home reading box. As to the other homes to which the reading matter ultimately goes, these may be, or may become, or may help others to become, the same type of home. At present little reading matter can enter, because the wage earner cannot spare enough from his wages to buy much literature, and is too tired to go to the library in the evening. There is often the same desire for reading in this home, though it has not had such a chance to become trained. The whole family has the same desire to see the pictures, and the children the same joy in colouring the drawings or cutting them out. The neighbours will like to borrow anything that is interesting, and the reader will increase his stock of information and his vocabulary, and form the habit of reading besides. There are exactly the same possibilities of developing habits and tastes. All that is lacking is the opportunity.
The one hope for the working man is through education, and the greatest educational possibilities now, with very few exceptions, go into the waste-baskets of the nation. For example, consider the pile of Saturday Evening Posts that come out each week. These would make a pile more than three miles high each week. Think of the many other magazines and their effect upon homes that cannot afford to buy them.[5]
Routing the Magazines.
The whole problem is to get the magazines from the home to the plant promptly and in the easiest way possible. When the first home reading box was established, we carried the magazines in our arms from our homes to the plant, where the magazines found their way to the home reading box by means of the inter-office messenger system. As other people became interested, there were more magazines than could be conveniently carried, so we sent an automobile around, now and then, for collecting the magazines and taking them to the plant. Gradually other people were asked to co-operate, and regular collections were made monthly by some member of the organization, who had time and an automobile at his disposal. If the auto was busy or the weather bad, an express wagon or a truck went the rounds. The aim, however, was, and is, always to have the collecting a part of the co-operation plan. It became a common sight in the town where the movement started to have a college professor take a Saturday afternoon off, and collect the magazines in his electric coupé, or to have one of the boys and his chums go out in a touring car, and fill the box at the plant, so that the men would find a fresh supply Monday morning. In some plants, where none of the homes in the vicinity has reading matter, it is boxed and sent by express from friends of the movement at a distance. Some bundles have come from as far as Bryn Mawr for the Home Reading Boxes in Providence.
It is a great sight to see the big bundles come in, and to watch the workers, as they are opened. Every one is allowed to take what he pleases and as many as he pleases. There have been no restrictions whatever, because the unhampered privileges have not been abused. He may bring any back, if he chooses, or he may keep all he takes, or he may pass them on to his less fortunate friends or neighbours who are not employed in a plant having a home reading box. He is rather urged to pass them on when he has finished with them, as we wish to maintain the reading club, or circulating library, idea. We consider the reading matter as loaned, and to be passed on in an endless chain. If the worker chooses to consider what he gets as a gift, that is his privilege. He may break the chain without reproach; in fact, breaking the chain has been the cause of starting real libraries on a small scale in many houses.