The September Issue of "The People's Home Journal"

1916

Most illuminating are the glimpses into the hearts and minds of the People's Home Journal's great family of readers. Letters by the score are received in every mail, graphic, spontaneous, a running fire of comment upon stories, pictures, the cover designs, department topics, etc., all vital and helpful to an editor who wishes to know of what his many millions of readers are thinking.

Because the Journal stories are "alive," every character in them has personality, which Journal readers are quick to discover. On the "Let's Talk It Over," page for September a recent Girl on the Cover is discussed. She is so "real" that readers have even given her a name — "Ruby," "Ariadne," and "Ruth." One enthusiast declares that "capable kindness is the keynote of her nature. The sweet solemnity of her big gray eyes prophesises that the strength and wisdom of her as well as her love, will guide the man of her choice steadily and safely through all the labyrinth of life." Quite as bewitching is the September Girl on the Cover.

The first autumn issue of the Journal concludes an absorbing serial by Agnes Louise Provost, "The Woman in the Case," and caters to the lover of mystery in a thrilling novelette, "Old Rodney's Will." Josiah Allen's Wife" in "A Fortunate Mistake" tells a rollickingly funny story about a pair of bashful sweethearts. Arthur Preston Hankins contributes a genuine small town chronicle in "The Silent Witness," the story of an absentminded doctor, the laying of a town-hall cornerstone and a mix up in town records which eventually straightens out financial tangles for a young man who wants to marry the only girl in the world. Armiger Barclay in a hold-up-story, "Into the Lion's Mouth," and Agnes Louise Pratt, in "The Extract Man," round out a well balanced ration of wholesome and appetizing fiction.

There are poems by Nancy Byrd Turner, Anna Porter Johnson and Daisy D. Stephenson, and a capital Green Meadow Story for the children by Thornton W. Burgess. The Fashions, Cookery, Interior Decoration and Care of Children departments are well edited and helpful. (Fifty cents a year.) New York.


World War I Humor

"We've learned a lot from the present war."
"Yes, indeed. Everything except what it's all about." — Detroit Free Press.

The Girl and Her Reading

1902

By W. D. Howells

What, then, is a good rule for a girl in her reading? Pleasure in it, as I have already said; pleasure, first, last and all the time. But as one star differs from another, so the pleasures differ. With the high natures they will be fine, and with the low natures they will be coarse. It is idle to commend a fine pleasure to the low natures, for to these it will be a disgust, as surely as a coarse pleasure to the high. But without pleasure in a thing read it will not nourish, or even fill, the mind; it will be worse provender than the husks which the swine did eat, and which the prodigal found so unpalatable.

Thence follows a conclusion that I am not going to blink. It may be asked, then, if we are to purvey a coarse literary pleasure to the low natures, seeing that they have no relish for a fine one. I should say yes, so long as it is not a vicious one. But here I should distinguish, and say farther that I think there is no special merit in reading as an occupation, or even as a pastime. I should very much doubt whether a low nature would get any good of its pleasure in reading; and without going back to the old question whether women should be taught the alphabet, I should feel sure that some girls could be better employed in cooking, sewing, knitting, rowing, fishing, playing basket ball or ping-pong than in reading the kind of books they like; just as some men could be better employed in the toils and sports that befit their sex.

I am aware that this is not quite continuing to answer the question as to what girls should read; and I will revert to that for a moment without relinquishing my position that the cult of reading is largely a superstition, more or less baleful. The common notion is that books are the right sort of reading for girls, who are allowed also the modified form of books which we know as magazines, but are not expected to read newspapers. This notion is so prevalent and so penetrant that I detected it in my own moral and mental substance, the other day, when I saw a pretty and prettily dressed girl in the elevated train, reading a daily newspaper quite as if she were a man. It gave me a little shock which I was promptly ashamed of for when I considered, I realized that she was possibly employed as usefully and nobly as if she were reading a book, certainly the sort of book she might have chosen. — Harper's Bazar.