The careful statistics of Dr. Reyer show that the greatest greed of reading is from
the age of fifteen to twenty-two, and is on the average greatest of all at twenty.
He finds that ten per cent of the young people of this age do forty per cent of all
the reading. Before twenty the curve ascends very rapidly, to fall afterward yet
more rapidly as the need of bread-winning becomes imperative. After thirty-five
the great public reads but little. Every youth should have his or her own library,
which, however small, should be select. To seal some knowledge of their content
with the delightful sense of ownership helps to preserve the apparatus of culture,
keeps green early memories, or makes one of the best tangible mementoes of
parental care and love. For the young especially, the only ark of safety in the
dark and rapidly rising flood of printer's ink is to turn resolutely away from the
ideal of quantity to that of quality. While literature rescues youth from individual
limitations and enables it to act and think more as spectators of all time, and
sharers of all existence, the passion for reading may be excessive, and books
which from the silent alcoves of our nearly 5,500 American libraries rule the
world more now than ever before, may cause the young to neglect the oracles
within, weaken them by too wide reading, make conversation bookish, and
overwhelm spontaneity and originality with a superfetation of alien ideas.
The reading passion may rage with great intensity when the soul takes its first
long flight in the world of books, and ninety per cent of all Conradi's cases
showed it. Of these, thirty-two per cent read to have the feelings stirred and the
desire of knowledge was a far less frequent motive. Some read to pass idle time,
others to appear learned or to acquire a style or a vocabulary. Romance led.
Some specialized, and with some the appetite was omnivorous. Some preferred
books about or addressed to children, some fairy tales, and some sought only
those for adults. The night is often invaded and some become "perfectly wild"
over exciting adventures or the dangers and hardships of true lovers, laughing
and crying as the story turns from grave to gay, and a few read several books a
week. Some were forbidden and read by stealth alone, or with books hidden in
their desks or under school books. Some few live thus for years in an atmosphere
highly charged with romance, and burn out their fires wickedly early with a
sudden and extreme expansiveness that makes life about them uninteresting and
unreal, and that reacts to commonplace later. Conradi prints some two or three
hundred favorite books and authors of early and of later adolescence. The natural
reading of early youth is not classic nor blighted by compulsion or uniformity
for all. This age seeks to express originality and personality in individual choices