1919
In Boston
BOOK stores are the intellectual barometers of our cities. Show me where people buy their books and I will tell you what sort of life they lead. Book stores always were and are mirrors of the habits and intellectual preferences of men and women.
The private library has ceased to be the pride of the home. Homes have given way to apartments and flats with only little space to spare for book shelves. The garage has taken the place of the library. We see our friends in hotels and clubs, we spend our evenings only rarely at home. Our Age of Electricity and rapid transportation facilities does not permit us to acquire the placid habits of book collectors and of book lovers. Sure enough we read books, because we want to know what their authors have to say. But the author remains a stranger to us, the book once read is done with forever. We speak about automobiles, we look forward to owning a machine, we are building garages with the same enthusiasm that our fathers used to expend on their libraries and their books.
New York is different. But New York is not an American city. It’s so near to Europe and its population so distinctly foreign that the change of the last 50 years is hardly noticeable yet in its book shops. Detroit, the old French settlement, which only ten years ago was a tenth of its present size, has no second-hand book shops at all. The Detroit book dealers mete out light summer fiction which fits into people’s lunch baskets in the summer and sentimental Christmas carols in the winter. Technical books, automobile literature are their specialties. This is only natural. Ninety per cent of the people are building motor cars in order to make a living; they are the buyers of the technical books. The minority live in order to buy cars and make motor trips, and therefore they need light fiction.
The character of Albany is most truthfully portrayed in its book stores. Our legislators have so much time on their hands that they actually read historical books, books about Dutch New York, about the Wars of the Revolution, law books, old state records. It is considered good form to collect a historical library after being elected to office and residing in Albany. But curiously enough in these same serious book stores loads of that sort of fiction can be found which smuthounds of the Vice Society are eternally trying to banish from earth. Philadelphia, of course, specializes in Quaker literature; Buffalo, infected by the spirit of near East Aurora, is swamped with the things Elbert Hubbard used to love. Chicago discloses the peculiar love for art, literature and philosophy that its great percentage of German workmen brought over from their fatherland and left as inheritance to the second and third generation. It is almost incredible, yet true, that laborers, coming home from work in the stock yards, stop at the book stalls and buy an add volume of Kant, or Heines’ “Ballads and Poems.” Chicago always had the finest German books in the country, most likely brought over by the immigrants.
San Francisco has a touch of the East. Books on mysticism, have the honor place. Curious books of all kinds are bought eagerly. Indeed, the book stores here tell you the story of California’s strange cults, of its mystics, its prophets and its thousands and one seekers after the hidden truths of the universe.
The last ten years have wrought an astonishing change in the book stores all over the country, but nowhere a sadder and more lamentable one than in Boston, Mass.