534. General.
534. General.—Lecturers should be reminded of their engagement a few days before each lecture. Nothing should be taken for granted. The lecturer’s instructions should be gone over carefully, and the state of the lantern screen, lantern, platform, signals and other accessories examined in time for any fault to be corrected. Attention to such details makes for success, while nothing is more annoying to lecturer and audience than a fault in such things.
535. Library Readings.
535. Library Readings.—Library readings revive, in a manner, the once famous popular penny readings; but in their new form such readings are free and are of subjects chosen because of their value and not primarily because they entertain. It is found that audiences are not only ready to listen to lectures about books, they are also ready to listen to readings from the books themselves. For some years at Southwark Mr R. W. Mould read The Christmas Carol and other famous works aloud to large audiences of library people. There is scarcely any limit to books that may be read aloud in this way—nearly all the novelists, poets, letter-writers, essayists, humorists, diarists can be used; and these are fairly easy for a good reader to deal with. But the reader must be a good one; poor reading is worse than none. It is usual for the reader to give a brief introductory sketch of his author, and to link the readings by connecting remarks. It is really remarkable to note the willingness of audiences to listen to readings of books which “everybody has read”; perhaps because they revive pleasant memories; probably, too, because the reading reveals unsuspected qualities in the book read. A more difficult, but even more interesting, type of reading may be made upon a subject, which is explained and illustrated from various authors; for example, on “Volcanoes, the genesis and development of scientific theory regarding them.” In this case an extract was read from Judd’s Volcanoes defining a volcano and presenting the ideas of the Greeks upon the subject; then extracts from the two Plinys; then the mediæval views were drawn from Pietro Toledo; Sir William Hamilton afforded an account of Vesuvius in eruption in 1767; and later matter was drawn from Elié de Beaumont, Scrope, Dana, Judd, Bonney, Anderson and Flint, and Heilprintz. Such a reading has proved most successful. These, too, can be illustrated with lantern slides, and the obvious value of slides showing titles, extracts, maps, etc., from books from which the readings are drawn need not be emphasized. The programme of a reading, given with slides, may be subjoined to show another treatment of a subject:
The Englishman in the Alps.
Early Views.
1. A Letter from the St Bernard Pass, February, 1188.
2. Seventeenth Century Dragons: Notes from Gribble’s “Story of Alpine Climbing.”
3. Over the Simplon Pass; from John Evelyn’s “Diary.”
4. Windham’s Climb to the Montanvert; from Matthew’s “Annals of Mont Blanc.”