The "Five Foot Shelf" is not picked out for especial disapprobation. As a matter of fact, I suppose it is far better, far more human in its selections, far more readable in some of its titles than most of these sets of "great" books. But there is something about every one of these collections of classics that acts like a palsy upon the reading faculty. It is a little mysterious, rather hard to define, but that it exists I have no manner of doubt. It would be impossible to doubt, after seeing it demonstrated so many times.
Take, at random, the titles of five famous books—books which are apt to turn up in these sets or collections. Plato's "Republic," the "Odyssey," the "Morte D'Arthur," the "Anatomy of melancholy," and "Don Quixote." Take the average man, the man usually known as the "business" man. Suppose that he has not read any of these books in his school days—that he has reached the age of forty without reading them. Now, the chances are at least a hundred to one that he never reads them. But let him buy one of the sets of thirty or forty volumes, in which these five books are included, and the chances against his reading any one of the five, instead of being diminished, are enormously increased. It is now certainly three hundred to one that he never reads any of the five books. There is something benumbing, something deadening, something stupefying, to the average man to take into his house six yards of solid "culture." And this I believe to be true as a general statement, in spite of instances which may be adduced here and there.
But, mind you, if this same man happens to have his attention called to one of the books—especially to either of the last two, as they are a little nearer the temper of our time—and if he gets one of them, by itself, there is now a fair probability that he may read at least part of it. He may even finish it.
If he really wishes to read the so-called great books let him forever beware of acquiring one of those overwhelming lumps of literature—the publisher's delight and the book-agent's darling—known by some such name as the Colossal Classics of the World. They breed hypocrites and foster humbugs. He buys them and thinks he is going to read them. They look ponderous and weighty and erudite upon his shelves—to the innocent. People exclaim: "My! What fine books you have!" He tries to smile a wise smile—to give the impression that they are the companions of his solitude, the consolation of his wakeful hours. He knows that these people won't ask if he has ever read any of them. They are afraid he might come back at them with: "Oh, yes, of course. Now, how do you like Milton's 'Areopagitica'?" After a time he begins to think he has read them—because he has looked at the backs, and started to cut one or two of them. Then it is all up with him. He never even tries to read them again. They just stand there and occasionally make him a little uncomfortable.
Making friends with books, and especially with those famous books which require some concentration, is like making friends with people. You can not do it in a wholesale, yardstick manner. If they come into our lives at all, they come subtly, slowly, one at a time. If a man should walk into this room saying: "All my life I have been without friends, I have decided that I wish to have friends—I am going to adopt all of you, every one of you, as a friend, here and now!"—you know how an experiment like that would succeed. It is the same with books.
In the competition for the best method to discourage reading, the second prize should be awarded to that pestilential invention—the Complete Works of an author. There was a publisher—he still lives—who told one of his agents: "Books are not made to read; they are made to sell." He was probably the inventor of that discourager of reading, the Complete Works.
If one of you wishes to keep a friend in total ignorance of any writer, there is an almost certain method—give him one of the sets of the Complete Works of that writer. It is a sure method to kill interest.
As in the case of the collections of classics, there is something wholesale and overpowering about such a set. It is thrown at your head, so to speak, in a chunk, and you never get over the blow. Imagine the case of a man who had never read Dickens. If he is wise, he goes at him one book at a time, he tests and he tries, and at the end of a few years he owns eight or ten books—well-thumbed books, that have been read, and that represent pleasure. But if he listens to the book-agent he contracts for a yard and a half of Dickens, and when it comes he gazes in despair at that rigid row of books—as unassailable as a regiment of Prussian grenadiers. That is the end of all intercourse between him and Charles Dickens.
"Oh, you might as well have them all," says the agent, "you needn't read the ones you don't like." That is what the waiter told the man when he brought him a breakfast-cup full of coffee, after dinner, instead of a demi-tasse: "You ain't got to drink all of it."
Miles upon miles of these sets of Complete Works are sold every year, and from one end of the land to the other, heads of families are sinking back comfortably upon their Morris chairs, and gazing in fatuous self-satisfaction at their bookcases, which they have just filled, at one swoop, with nine yards of the Complete Works of Scott, Cooper, Dumas, Dickens, and Thackeray.