The morning times., 1897-02-14


The stray periodical, after the first few
minutes of pleasure experienced in cutting
its pretty pages and glancing through
its fresh contents, is a nuisance. 1t lies
about the house, gets mistaken for the
latest humber, and is dogs cared and
soled and dusty, to be finally cut up by
the children for paper dolls or scrap books.
The stories are half of them continued and
one number of a continued story is tan
tiiiZing. The way TO get the real comfort
out of magazine, Corinna says is to sub
scribe font, especially if one lives in the
country, where the coming OF the new
monthly is an event. In the twelve
month one will get two or three good
novels. several fine poems, a series of
scientific or historical articles, and short
stories, by some of the very best authors
of the day.
Corinna knows a country girl who has
become very well-read person through
the education of the magazine, and though
she has only been to two or three art ex-
hibitions in her whole life, so cunningiy
has her taste been educated by the repro
duct!ons of famous pictures and the not
boilers contributed by so many Of the
artists wi afterward gain eminence, that
she can talk of art more intelligently than
half of the people in town. Perhaps this
is an exceptional case, but the great mag;l-
zines certainly deserve to rank among
this country's agencies of culture They
are sort of academy for the people who
must get their education at home.
The subscription volume is u terrible
affair. There is a legend of a man who
once wanted to make million dollars and
make it quick. He went to work and got
together all of the religious clippings on
a future life that he Gould find: all of the
clippings about home, and all that an ybody
had written about mothers. He made a
big book OF them, as large as Webster s
Unabridged almost, and lie put on the out
side in big gilt letters:
"Mother; Home; Heaven
He made his million; He was only ap-
pealing to tile crude feeling for art in the
American people: the true hearted 10 yalty to
home and mother and religion that made
Eugene Field so Isaeh loved by people
who had scarcely read three of his poems.
But that doesn't alter the fact that most of
the big book was probably heart breaking
rubbish. 55Ffg
The beautiful labels on other subsc rption
books, and the beautiful motives of the
people who buy them, do not make them
valuable as literature.
Steer clear of the subscription book at So
or So, or Sd, if you haven't much money
and desire a real library.
. 4it.
The second hand bookstore is the real
boon to the book-loyer There is the real
democracy of literature, for the little vol
ume Of Field or Dickens brings more than
the big book, which was 'all the rage''
lately There one can find all the novels,
old and new, in covers just a little shabby,
but print as clear and thoughts as fine as
ever, and for half the original price
Corinna has half dozen volumes of
Houghton & Miff1in editions, as good as
new, for which she paid a quarter each.
She has other books Of the carefully
bound paper-covered editions, which open
wide in the middle and have respectable
margins, which cost all the way from
five to twenty-five cents each-volumes by
Backmore, Barrie, Howells, Kipling, Rich
ard Harding Davis, the great Bret Harte,
and almost every other modern novelist
She has shabby old copies of Dickens and
George Elliot, which some other book.
lover has read &hd dreamed over, fol-
there are no pencil marks on the margins
and the leaves are clean. Corinna has an