WISE READING

Greymouth Evening Star, 7 September 1939, Page 5

WISE READING

VITAL TO DEMOCRACY. LONDON, June 14. A business firm wrote to the British Museum the other day asking for advertisement rates in the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.”

Mr. Arundell Esdaile, secretary of the Museum, stated this yesterday in his presdiential address to the Library Association Conference at Liverpool. “They appareently took it to be a magazine published by the British Museum,” he added. The. “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,” the earliest history of this country, consists of fragile manuscripts, yellow with age, -which are among the most valuable of the nation’s treasures. . Making a plea for wise reading, which was. he said, more vitally necessary, in a democracy 7 than in any other society, Mr. Esdaile said: “We, in whose country representa-. live government works, do not understand that, in most other old countries it does not work at all. “The Continental nations have always found the English maddeningly pragmatic and averse from neat logical, theories of human affairs. “Half-logic produces those shallow doetirnes-of-all-work whose names end in ‘ism,’ the reach-merdowns of thought, bearing the same relation to thinking that tin-openers do to cooking. We English have tended to eschew their use. Hence the English success, such as it is.” Mr. Esdaile defended the “considerable intellectual activity” required in foretelling the end of a detective story, and the “knowledge and acumen which are needed to be equal to the crossword’s Grand Inquisitors."