What You Read

1895

It is the feudal sentiment of good Sir Walter and his successors which makes our daughters despise the democracy which their fathers founded and dream of baronial castles, parks and coronets and a marriage with a British peer as the goal of their ambitions.

It is the same feudal sentiment which makes their mothers share and encourage their aspirations and equip them in Paris with all the ethereal ammunition required for the English campaign. Half the novels they read glorify these things, and it would be a wonder if the perpetual glorification did not produce its effect, for the idea that literature of amusement is a neutral agency which affects you neither for good nor for ill is a pernicious fallacy. What you read, especially in youth, will enter into your mental substance and will and must increase or impair your efficiency. Much you will outgrow, no doubt, but there always remains a deposit in the mind which you will never outgrow.

It is therefore of the utmost importance that that which you read should tend to put you en rapport with the present industrial age, in which, whether you like it or not, you have to live, rather than with a remote feudalism, whose ideals were essentially barbaric and certainly cruder and less humane than ours. — H. H. Boyesen in Forum.

Mind Over Matter

1895

The Poor Reader of the Astor Library and His Luxurious Feast.

His coat had the olive tint of age and exposure, the edge of the sleeves wore as frayed as a decrepit toothbrush, and the bottoms of his shiny black trousers might have been exhibited as a piece of rare old tapestry. The hat which he laid on the table of the Astor library reading room was a picturesque ruin, and his linen was clean, but starchless, and had evidently been rough laundered at home. The man within these clothes was tall and lank, and the top story of the man was a fine patriarchal head, with a high, narrow forehead, from which the gray hair had long ago fallen out in the march of years, and his eyes were those of a thinker.

As he sat down he was all aglow with the mild excitement of the book man, for there had been handed out to him an uncut magazine, that cheerful and airy periodical, The International Journal of Ethics, and as he slid the broad ivory paper knife between its leaves there was a twinkle of satisfaction in his eyes that would not have come if he had just been bowed to by the richest man in New York. With him the opening of those pages was a work of literary sensuality, and when at last it was finished he laid the knife down with a sigh. But in another moment he was all aglow again, and settling himself back in his chair he propped the magazine against his poor old hat and plunged into a ten page article on "Luxury."

It was a triumph of mind over matter which would have made old Plato pop off his pedestal in the lobby below for very joy could he but have seen it. — New York Sun.

Jumbled English

1919

A school patron talking with a prominent educator the other day said that with all of the effort made in North Carolina schools to give the child a fair knowledge of the English language, he did not believe there was one child in a hundred in the schools of the State who could recite a sentence of twenty words in a clear, distinct and articulate tone of voice. The pity is that there is so much truth in the statement, comments the Raleigh News Observer.

Go into a classroom and hear the children read. Is it not the exception when a child knows how to pronounce its syllables distinctly? Syllables and letters both are too often wholly ignored. Words are jumbled together too frequently in incoherent fashion. Worst of all and at the bottom of the trouble is the fact that some of the teachers are less proficient than they should be in distinctness of speech, while others who are more precise themselves, pay insufficient attention to the pronunciation of the children.

The old-fashioned elocution class in which the children were taught to utter their syllables distinctly might very well come back in place of some of the things that are more pretentious, but have less value in the school.

An Eccentric Wisconsin Man

1878

The Milwaukee (Wis.) Sentinel says: Capt. William Plocker, of Brandon, is a peculiar man — quite peculiar.

He was educated for a banker, but never adopted the profession. Thirty years ago he located in the town of Metomen, Fon du Lac county, having purchased a large tract of land. Previous to that he had spent some years as a steamboat official on the western lakes. His was one of the best managed farms in Metomen, yet he found ample time to do an immense amount of reading.

His library is one of the largest in the county, embracing many of the choicest works, and every one of the thousands of books has been read and reread by the captain. He is well posted on any subject, almost, that may be named. At times when thinking or reading he is oblivious to everything about him.

In his early days, his farm-house, near Fairwater, was converted into a public house, with himself as proprietor. While the captain was in one of his brownest of brown studies, a traveler stepped in and asked if he could get accommodations. There was no answer. A second, third and fourth time the question was propounded, with a like result. By that time the would- be patron's patience had departed, and he gave the captain a slap on the cheek which sent him whirling to the floor. Imagine the surprise of that traveler when Plocker gathered himself up, reoccupied his chair, and proceeded with his thinking, without as much as a "thank you."

On one occasion, when the hired man was away, the captain had ten cows to milk. It took him until nearly midnight, and when the task was completed he deliberately poured the eight pailsful of milk into the swill barrel, detecting the mistake just as the last pail was drained.

One day, at Brandon, he went to the house of a friend when the house was full of visitors. Going to the library he picked up a book and returned to the parlor, filled with happy guests, stretched himself at full length on the lounge, read an hour or more, and then, without having said a word or looked at a person, took his departure.

After serving his district in the Assembly in 1875, he sold his farm for $12,000, visited the old country, and is now a resident of Brandon, whose people talk of making him their first village president.

Glossomancy New Science

1914

Reads Character by the Shape of the Tongue

PARIS, Aug. 1. — Glossomancy, or reading the character by the shape of the tongue, is a new science which has just come before the public and is creating quite a furor.

The glossomancers, or glossomancists, assert that a long tongue shows frankness; a short tongue, dissimilation; a broad tongue, unreservedness; a narrow tongue concentration.

When the tongue is long and broad the owner is inclined to be gossipy. When the tongue is long and narrow, he is moderately open and frank.

Those who possess short and broad tongues are untruthful; those whose tongues are short and narrow are sly as well as bad-tempered.

A Glimpse of Longfellow

1896

In "A Glimpse of Longfellow," published in one of the magazines, Rev. Minot J. Savage calls him "the most widely read poet of the English-speaking world." This is approximately true, observes the New York World, and the cause for it is found in the poet's universal sympathy with the literature of all times and countries.

He is the most widely read poet of America because of all American poets he read most widely. The extent of his studies is astonishing. In his youth he went deep into the early literature of England, and added to the usual college acquaintance with the classics a knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon language and literature which did much to insure his success. He went from Saxon to the Scandinavian languages and to old Norse; then to old High German and from that to Italian, making a translation of Dante, which if lacking in the high poetic art of the original verse will always be respectable.

As a result of wide literary sympathies, he was able to appeal to the universal human nature. If he had something of natural provincialism in his youth, his maturity knew no boundary of section or country. His works have been translated into all the principal languages of Europe because by long labor he learned to understand the common humanity that underlies all differences of Nationality.

The central fact of his career was his great capacity for work. It made him the greatest of New England poets and one of the most useful men of his century.

Early Calculator — Lifesaver for Schoolboys?

1900

In one of the statistical divisions of the Department of Agriculture in Washington may be seen a machine resembling a typewriter, which multiplies and divides with unerring accuracy and with great rapidity.

Give its operator a multiplicand of six figures and a multiplier as large, and he will write them out as upon a typewriter; then he turns a handle a few times, and before the onlooker knows what is going on, the product is written out before him. The machine performs examples in division with equal ease.

Does any one of our young readers fancy that he sees in this invention an emancipation of boys of the twentieth century from the vexation of the multiplication table? Alas! that is too much for him to hope. Nobody seems to have devised a machine for adding common fractions of different denominators, although many a young schoolboy has concluded that this is one of the "long-felt wants" of the day.


Intemperance in France

Those who assert that wine-growing countries are largely exempt from the evils of intemperance need not point to France in proof of their assertion. The habitual use of wine often creates the craving which seeks for such stronger stimulants as absinthe or vermouth.

Of about three thousand prisoners in the department of the Seine, in which Paris is situated, it is officially stated, more than two thousand were drunkards. The number of suicides induced by habits of intemperance is said to have more than doubled in recent years. Alcoholism is also largely responsible for the fact that thirty-four per cent of the young men conscripted for the army are sent back as unfit; and in the cities of Normandy, where hard cider is the common beverage, the proportion rejected is much larger. It rises in Caen to fifty per cent; and in Havre three-fourths of the conscripts are rejected.


Vested Interest in Getting It Right

Senator Vest recently sent a newspaper item to be read to the House. The secretary had the wrong side of the clipping, and instead of an editorial on the money question, began: "Ridiculous! We are giving away these goods at half price!" "The other side!" cried Mr. Vest.

That the much vaunted common sense of the American people has another side is forcibly illustrated by recent sales of a good-luck box. This precious humbug is a little wooden case, containing a worthless three-starred ring, worth in all about five cents. But within the past three months many thousands of persons have paid ninety-nine cents apiece for it, expecting it to bring good luck. In this and similar instances the notice might appropriately made: "Ridiculous! We are giving ourselves away for nothing!"

—Youth's Companion.

A Useful Literary Work

1910

Good Literature and Adjustment for Ironing Board Made Most Enticing Combination

It was hard work selling books. The volumes, one of which the agent had to carry with him as a sample, were very bulky and heavy, and nobody seemed to want them. But the agent was a persistent fellow, and even the stubborn Mrs. Butts could not send him away unheard.

"We have all the books we can use," she was saying, "and we really can't afford any more reading matter. Why I haven't even opened the second volume of that Roman History you sold us last spring. Now, if you were selling one of those adjustable ironing boards—"

"I've got just the thing," said the agent, cheerfully. "There are 12 books in this set and you can use either one or two or three, and so on up to six to tilt your board any way you want to. And between whiles when your iron is heating you have good literature right at hand." — Youth's Companion.

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.

Singular New Disease — "Soul Blindness"

1906

Man Afflicted with "Soul Blindness" Cannot Bead or Recognize Pictures

Berlin. — The latest thing in the line of diseases is soul blindness, the name having been devised by Prof. Schuster, of Berlin. It appears that the professor lately had a patient under his care suffering from a lack of mental association. The man was educated and spoke coherently, but could not read; the printed characters conveyed no meaning to his mind. His senses all appeared normal, and there was no indication of physical disease.

He could recognize and name all the objects around him; but printed words, or sketches of the simplest objects, he was utterly unable to name; in fact, to quote the words of the professor, "He could not tell a boat from a tree or a house."

The theory advanced by Prof. Schuster to account for this peculiar condition is, that the connection between the eyes and that particular portion of the brain concerned in the association of ideas has been severed in some manner, and until that connection is restored, the condition will continue.

From what he has seen of the patient, he considers it extremely doubtful whether this important junction will ever be effected.

The School Room

1874

The ringing notes of the school bell at 9 o'clock in the morning echo through every village and hamlet in the land. With books and lunch basket, children, little and large, hasten their response to its call. They gather in rooms of every size and of every grade of comfort, from the log cabin chinked with mud to the elegant and costly structure of brick furnished with apparatus and meeting every physical want.

However, the school-rooms may differ, the course of study is essentially the same in them all. The "three R's, reading, riting, and rithmetic," are the corner stones now, as they were in the olden time, of a good education, and teachers of every grade of culture and experience are drilling the juvenile mind in fractions, interest, and square root, in spelling and reading, in grammar and geography.

The school committee, the trustees, and the teachers are supposed by most parents to be quite competent to take entire charge of the children committed to their care, and when once school taxes are paid, books purchased, and the children entered, the parents are quite ready to throw all further responsibility upon the proper authorities.

Little do most of them trouble themselves about the teacher, whether or not he is competent mentally, morally for the task he has undertaken, for have not the school committee decided that, and who shall appeal from their decision? So the teacher is left quite to himself in his little empire, and without sympathy or co-operation on the part of parents discharges his duties and receives his pay.

In the old days when "boarding round" was the fashion it was not easy for the teacher and the parents to remain unacquainted, but now it is by no means an uncommon circumstance for them never to meet. "Have you been in the school lately?" we ask frequently. "No," is the invariable reply, "I'm intending to go, but haven't got there yet."

Now we believe that intelligent co-operation between parents and teachers is essential to the best results in education, and that every parent should, as far as possible, note the daily progress of his child in his studies, that he should assure the teacher of his cordial and earnest sympathy and support in the arduous labors of the school-room, and by his own occasional presence there, show his interest in the progress of the school.

Twenty Rules for Health

1874

1. Remember the author of the laws which govern the human body is the author of the Ten Commandments.

2. Infidelity to the laws — established that mankind should be healthy and happy — is the greatest sin of the present generation.

3. Be cheerful, trustful of others, and faithful to your own best conception of duty. Never brood over troubles that you have, and be sure you never borrow any.

4. Be much in the sunlight, and prefer light-colored clothing.

5. Drones must die. Exercise liberally and live. Be out-doors all you can while the sun shines.

6. Breathe pure air. Live with open windows, and the windows of heaven will be more likely to open for you.

7. Pray with a pure heart and a clean skin. Bathe often.

8. Avoid stimulation by spirits of all kinds, strong coffee and tea, opium and tobacco.

9. Keep the head cool, feet and heart warm, hopes heavenward, and fingernails clean.

10. Eat only three times daily, and never between meals — not a nut nor an apple. Drink nothing while eating.

11. One hearty meal of meat per day is sufficient. The other two should be spare.

12. Avoid late, hearty suppers, pork, spices and pepper, rich pastry, and imperfectly cooked beans.

13. Wheat, oat and barley meal, with beans, peas, lean meats, fish and wild game, are the best articles of food.

14. Fruits are cooling to the blood, and especially adapted to warm weather.

15. Eat slowly, masticate your food well, and eat nothing for three hours before retiring.

16. Let the time spent at table be happy. Encourage pleasant, cheerful conversation; joke, but do not argue. Rest a half hour after every hearty meal.

17. Sleep eight hours of each day.

18. Brain, bone and muscle are built of different material, and the brainworker should have food different from the muscle-worker. He is not thoroughly educated who cannot select food adapted to his needs.

19. Avoid corsets, and suspend no article of clothing from the waist. Protect every part of the body from chill and exposure.

20 Study hygiene, attend health lectures and read health literature. As you are ignorant or intelligent in physiology will your habits be wise or otherwise.


Note: Consult with your physician before taking questionable health advice. There has been progress in health information, I've heard, since 1874. The information here is for entertainment purposes only. And I'm not so sure it's good enough for even that.



You may glean knowledge by reading, but you must separate the chaff from the wheat by thinking.


Economy is the parent of integrity, of liberty and of ease, and the beauteous sister of temperance, of cheerfulness and health. Profuseness is a cruel and crafty demon, that gradually involves her followers in dependence and debt.


A clergyman in Dundee, Scotland, announced to his congregation that, in consequence of his inability to afford coals for keeping up his study fire, he had discontinued studying, and would preach old sermons until a fall in the price.

Books — The Best Friends

1920

THE BEST FRIENDS
by Sidney Dark, in John O'London's Weekly

When once the love of books has come into a man's life he can never be lonely, he can never be bored, he can never lose his interest in life, he can never be quite unhappy. Books are the friends that never fail, and the men and women that only live in books are the best and the most real friends of all.

The happy life is not spent altogether in the world of streets and shops and offices. A large part of it must be lived in the world of imagination. And living with the imaginings of great writers, we, too, learn to dream and the happiest homes in the world are the castles in the air that we build for ourselves. They are, indeed, the only homes the foundations of which are unshakable rocks.

How Joel Chandler Harris Came to Write "Uncle Remus"

1909

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS.

The Way He Came to Write His "Uncle Remus" Stories.

Many great works of genius, as is well known, have been produced by accident, and an author is seldom the best judge of his own work. When Joel Chandler Harris wrote the first of his "Uncle Remus" stories and presented it for publication he did so with a hundred misgivings. He was not sure that his venture in negro folklore would prove successful. He could not know that they would bring him worldwide fame.

At the time described Mr. Harris was a young man of twenty-eight, employed on the Atlanta Constitution. Sam W. Small, afterward a revivalist, who had been writing for the same paper a popular column of negro story and dialect, had just resigned from the staff. The managing editor of the Constitution, wishing to continue the feature, said to Harris one day: "Joel, it seems to me you could do that sort of thing to a tee. See if you can't turn in something tonight."

The young writer's memory flitted back to his early days on a plantation. All the quaint settings of negro life — the little cabins, the fiddling darkies, the wrinkled story teller, the black "mammies," the noisy corn shuckings, the bobtailed rabbits disappearing along the road — came hurrying from the past. Late that afternoon he turned in his copy. The next day his reputation was made. — Current Literature.

Poetry Said Nourishment To Supplement Daily Bread

Ohio, 1940

A group of about fifty poetry lovers met at the Brumback Library last night to enjoy Rev. John H. Lamy's talk on "Standards of Poetic Excellence."

Rev. Lamy began by saying we need other nourishment than our daily bread and that is poetry. Without it our civilization would soon be at an end. We need not only to read poetry but we should write poetry as a form of self expression. The main value in writing is in what it does to us.

Poetry, according to Rev. Lamy's definition, is "Great thought expressed in artistic language." Verse, he said, is any thought that rhymes, while doggerel has no intention of being great thought. There are many possible standards of poetic excellence, depending on the approach, whether it is as a writer, a critic or an appreciative layman. A good way to judge a poem is to ask, "Is this one I would like to memorize?"

First, great poetry is great though, and Rev. Lamy listed and commented on six great poetic themes — aspiration, or the upward climb of the soul; nature, for beautiful nature does for us what human relations cannot do; home and country, poems that inspire patriotism and love of country, and here Rev. Lamy voiced a public protest against the silly parody on our great poems; courage, poems that make us want to draw in our chins and try again; mercy and justice, showing our responsibility toward our brother; and immortality.

Second, great poetry must be artistic in expression. Such poems make one see things; they paint pictures. All through his talk, Rev. Lamy illustrated his points by reading parts of his favorite poems, many of them learned when a boy, and he closed by commending the reading and memorizing of great poetry and the setting down of one's own thoughts.

—Van Wert Times-Bulletin, Van Wert, OH, Oct. 26, 1940, page 6.

Famous Authors as They Died

1916

Literary men as a rule die nobly. They seem to meet death with philosophical quietude, as did the great Victor Hugo. Rousseau, it is said, when dying ordered his attendants to place him before the window that he might once more behold the setting sun and take his farewell of earth. Petrarch was found dead in his library with his head upon a book. Barthelemy was reading Horace, we are informed, when, his hand becoming cold, he dropped the book, his head inclined to one side, and he seemed only to sleep. His nephew, however, discovered that he was dead. Bayle expired while correcting the proof sheets of his dictionary. Waller died repeating some lines of Virgil. Although taken away in the "midst of life," Keats' end did not come so suddenly. When near death he was asked by a friend how he felt. "Better, my friend," said he. "I feel the daisies growing over me!"

The Charm of A Great Biography

1916

It Leads the Reader Into Quaint and Delightful Byways

Reading biography will furnish you with a peculiar and rare form of entertainment, for besides the subject at hand biography legitimately treats of the foibles, the fashions and the peculiarities of the age with which it deals, says Youth's Companion.

History, although it may have its lighter moments, is essentially sober, but biography, although it is never merely farcical or satirical, may touch vividly open the lighter phases of life and take you, as it were, into quaint and delightful byways, through private parks and into remote and lovely fields.

"Indeed," wrote Boswell in his introduction to his famous biography, "I cannot conceive a more perfect mode of writing any man's life than by not only relating the most important events of it in their order, but by interweaving what he privately wrote and said and thought, by which mankind are enabled, as it were, to see him live and to live o'er each scene with him as he actually advanced through the several stages of his life."

Biography, treated in that manner, must inevitably include much that is delightfully diverting. It will give you "the table talk of the great;" it will recount those fascinating little incidents and anecdotes that history so often regards as beneath its notice. It will afford far more than a running account of a life, "beginning with a pedigree and ending with a funeral."

Ten Benefits of Literature Named by Brown in Talk

1922

"Literature — Why Study It," is Subject of English Lecture

"Literature is the textbook on human nature," said H. G. Brown, instructor in English, Tuesday afternoon at the Law building in his lecture on "Literature — Why Study It." Ten benefits which can be derived from reading literature were given. "Knowledge of human nature is acquired better through familiarity with the masterpieces than even real life," Brown declared. Brown, who explained that one can associate with a man for month without knowing him as well as you could know Macbeth or Hamlet in four hours. "Literature gives all the significant details of a man's life in complete sequence, while real life gives only glimpses."

"Literature is a cure for provincialism. With this as the medium we may travel and know the world from the Moab of Ruth to the Mississippi Valley of Tom Sawyer," said Mr. Brown. "We may travel back over great periods of time and know the common people of the fourteenth century through Chaucer's Prologue. We may travel up and down through unfamiliar society."

—The Capital Times, Madison, Wisconsin, July 27, 1922, page 8.

Wives Going Through Their Husbands' Pockets and Other Humor

Humor, 1908
----------
One Woman's Wrongs.
Mrs. Smallpurse (who found only a few dimes in her husband's pockets that morning)—I am just sick of this plodding along year after year. Why don't you do something to make money?
Mr. Smallpurse—I can't make any more than a living at my business, no matter how hard I work.
Mrs. Smallpurse—Then do something else. Invent something. Any American can invent.
Mr. Smallpurse (some months after) —My dear, I've hit it, and I've got a patent. My fortune is made.
Mrs. Smallpurse (delighted)—Isn't that grand! What did you invent?
Mr. Smallpurse—I have invented a barbed-wire safety pocket for husbands. — New York Weekly.

Wiser.
"He's been in Paris for a year, I believe. He must be very wealthy."
"Well, he used to have more money than he knew what to do with."
"You mean he isn't as wealthy as he was?"
"Oh, no; I mean he has been in Paris long enough to acquire more knowledge."

Documentary Evidence.
Her Mother—I should rather you would not go sailing with that young man, Clara; I don't believe he knows a thing about a sailboat.
Clara—Oh, but he does, mamma; he showed me a letter of recommendation from a New York firm he used to work for, and they speak very highly of his salesmanship.—The Circle.

A New Excuse.
"I suppose your husband is proud to contribute his share toward the support of our beautiful library?" "Yes," answered the woman with the slightly acid expression; "only John was none too industrious in the first place and now he's tempted to put in most of his time reading novels and trying to get his money's worth." —Washington Star.

The Telephone Girl's Amendment.
Said the business man with a grouch against the telephone central:
"One day I was calling a number and said, 'Get me on four hundred so and so.' The girl said, 'Fourteen-hundred so-and-so?' So the next time I called the number I thought I'd be forehanded.
"I said, 'Get me fourteen-hundred so-and-so.' And the girl asked, 'One four- oh-oh so-and-so'."

Didn't Need It.
Agent—Here's a book that will be welcome in every family. It contains all the rules of etiquette and directions for avoiding slips in grammar.
Hiram Grasscutt—Don't need nothin' of that kind. Got a daughter hum from boardin' school, a son goin' to high school an' a hired man who's a college feller workin' fer his health. But, by jing, partner, it's a relief to talk once in a while to a common, ordinary person. I don't need the book, but I'm darned glad you called.

It's All Right, Then.
She—You have kissed other girls, haven't you?
He—Yes; but no one that you know. — Harper's Weekly.

Many a man is buried in oblivion long before he is dead.

After calling a prisoner down the judge is apt to send him up.

--The Bayard Advocate, Bayard, Iowa, March 26, 1908.