The age-herald., 1902-01-05
Books in the Past and Present
BY ALFRE D CECIL.

Without doubt this is an era of rush. Few persons are met with nowadays who are not all feverishly engaged in the occupation of annihilating time. One would suppose labor saving inventions would have greatly increased leisure time. In the olden days the numbering coach consumed many of the travellers hours and the slowness of the post clogged the wheels of industry; but the mile minute trains of today have not afforded the traveller more time or the merchant greater leisure. On the contrary the one has become more busy than before and the merchant finds he has no leisure at all.
 It was during the period when malls were slow and time hung on the traVel- CT and merchants hands Walter Scote, Thackeray and Dickens wrote novels ana nublishers issued them in parts. Each in stalment of a successful novel was await ed for impatiently by an interested public. What would be the fate of Scott Dickens and Thackeray in these bustling times?
 Never in the worlds history have books been produced so rapidly and so abund- antly They embrace every held or thought and never. perhaps have there been so many readers. It Is no eXagger- ation to state that twenty persons are ready, and do buy, where one bought fifty years ago. But do books make the impression on the readers minds they did in the oden times?
 It seems to me, and in this supposition I may err, the impression books used to make was stronger than 1t is today. The readers of those days read with keener sense of enjoyment They abandoned hat aa f0 the hook. they surrendered themselves to It's influence; they forgot their surroundings, their cares, their business; they lived for the time being in the scenes pictured by the author, among the persons to whom he introduced them Today everything and anything is read It may have been recommended by the bookseller, news boy on a train, by a paragraph In newspaper. by a friend or by an adver- tisemont It is read at intervals, at times when there is a little leisure. It is read as a time-killer. The daily newspaper is not so treated. Hundreds, nay hum dreds of thousands of men can state defi nitely that between such and such hours they read such and sucn newspapers each and every day. But how many can say the same of book?
 In the olden days the reader was not always in search of the latest success. The last novel that attained popularity was merely delicious morsel; the daily feast was made up or historic and class ical volumes. People read not cnly for amusement, but for information. They found their pleasure not only in the plot of a story and in the characters moving through it, but in the life it presented. A novel with a good historic backbone led readers to study the times it pictured.
 When "A tale of Two Cities" made its appearance the records show books bear ing on the French Revolution were de- manded of the libraries and when "The Virginians'' appeared inquiry was made at the same places for books concerning Washington Wolfe, Montcalm, Webb and Quebec. Recently Richard Carver was published. It exceeded "A Tale of Two Cities and "The Virginians'' by many thousands. counting the sale in the first year of each. Churchill was quite as good a historian as Dickens or Thackeray and the glimpses he gave of Maryland and Virginia and London at those times were quite as appetlsing as those given by the great authors mentioned; still. no effect was witnessed by the demand for books