College Libraries Encourage Reading
N v vOWADAYS when we have the choice of thousands of volumes, including a representative selection of the great books in admirable series available at the price of a movie ticket, it is disconcerting to learn that reading in the average American home has been losing ground in its race with other leisure-time activities. A sample of the cultivated life of our citizenry in the 1g30's is given by Mr. R. L. Duffus in his volume Books. Their Place in a Democracy, em bodying the results of investigation into the publication and distribution of books. From evidence based on publishers' output and sales, publicand rental-library circulation figures, and a generous measure of guesswork, he concludes that the average American buys two books a year, borrows two from the public library, rents two from the rental collections, and borrows one a year from a friend, a "possible total of seven books a year read by the average American." More reliable and illuminating in its details is the study of reading habits made by William S. Gray and Ruth Munroe, and reported in the book The Reading Interests and Habits of Adults. The writers of this book analyzed and summarized the work of a great many investigators who had studied reading habits in different parts of the country and with people of all ages, occupations, and interests. From this study, one learns that not one person in two ever reads any books at all, and that those who do devote less than half an hour a day to reading them. I should imagine that though this study is now aDout ten years old, the picture of reading habits is much the same today. In competition with newspaper and magazine reading, the movie, the radio, golf, bridge, and the automobile, books are apparently hardly in the running.' If books are lacking and book reading is negligible in the home, how about in our colleges? It is all too plain that there are powerful counterattractions to reading on the campus. In his genial, devastating way, President Dodds of Princeton calls attention to some of them: