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Updated: June 23, 2025
The Oriental may be inscrutable, but he is no more puzzling than the average American. We admit that we are hard, keen, practical, the adjectives that every casual European applies to us, and yet any book-store window or railway news-stand will show that we prefer sentimental magazines and books. Why should a hard race if we are hard read soft books?
"I will lend you that book to-night," said one of these apprentices to him, "if you will return it clean in the morning," alluding to a certain volume which Benjamin was looking over in the book-store. "I should be glad to read it," answered Benjamin; "I think I can read it through before I go to bed, and so return it in the morning when I go to the office."
By the end of that week he had the run of things; had met his professors, one of whom had preached that sermon two summers before, and now, on being told who the lad was, welcomed him as a sheaf out of that sowing; had been assigned to his classes; had gone down town to the little packed and crowded book-store and bought the needful student's supplies so making the first draught on his money; been assigned to a poor room in the austere dormitory behind the college; made his first failures in recitations, standing before his professor with no more articulate voice and no more courage than a sheep; and had awakened to a new sense the brotherhood of young souls about him, the men of his college.
When I reached the point where the teacher ordered me to get a United States History, the book-store did not have one, but sold me a biography of Martin Luther instead, which I studied for some time, thinking that I was learning something about the United States.
The books given are reliable, are prettily illustrated, are now in print, and are easily obtainable at any book-store. If they are not in stock the book-seller will be glad to send for them. Further, to aid in selecting and ordering, the retail price is added.
An hour later, shaven and dressed, he was sitting at his desk looking at a small piece of paper he had taken out of his wallet. It was scrawled with semi-legible memoranda: "See Mr. Howland at five. Get hair-cut. See about Rivers' bill. Go book-store." Finally, down at the bottom and in a hurried scrawl: "Dick and Gloria Gilbert for tea." This last item brought him obvious satisfaction.
When that was over, to walking with Selma; sometimes as a sheer round of exercise in company, sometimes to visit a print-shop, exhibition of pictures, book-store, or other attraction of the hour.
Of course it was done to widen the establishment's patronage to bring people into the store. Equally of course, it was destroying the book business and debauching the reading tastes of the community. Without the profits from the light and ephemeral popular literature of the season, the book-store proper could not keep up its stock of more solid works, and indeed could not long keep open at all.
Betty thought that Aladdin's palace could not have been more splendid than the jeweller's shop where the canine cuff-buttons were bought; but when they came to the book-store, she forgot gold, silver, and precious stones, to revel in picture-books, while Thorny selected Ben's modest school outfit.
He can look over all the periodicals in the local book-store in fifteen minutes. He can select the one he wants, take this bit of printed matter home, go through the contents, find the three articles he prefers, get an evening of reading out of them, and be happy. Every day as many photoplays come to our town as magazines come to the book-store in a week or a month.
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