THE READING HABIT.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XVIII, Issue XVIII, 30 November 1912, Page 10

THE READING HABIT.

This great multiplication of books has caused a great many people to study? Have people really the reading habit?

,;•/ the reading habit I mean (said Mr •Jaynor, the Mayor at New \

recent address) the intelligent reading of books, the reading of books to weigh and find out what is in them; or are your patrons generally people who skim o» rer books and idly read them—read

eai only for amusement or pastime, ml know nothing about them after

ley get through with them?

When the art of alphabetical writing \s as first discovered, people bemoaned it

— 1 am not talking of the art of printing, 1 am talking of alphabetical writs', lg. Even the philosopher Plato said v was-a thing which had done injury to mankind-—this discovery -of the alphabetical art. He said that it stopped peo•ld from thinking; that without the know, because -they would have to carry ..Iphabet people would have to learn profoundly everything they wanted to it in their heads. He said the discovery of the alphabet had made a place in . litiug for the lodgment of all know'cdge, and the people, knowing that ey could at any time go to it and

vet it as it was written out at any time, no longer studied things profoundly and saturated themselves with them and memorised them so that they were a part of their being.

If that be so, what must we say oi .lie mechanical art of printing? That made the evil that Plato saw a thous-

and times worse, but I suppose old Plato was mistaken; he was a growler; too. He didn't want to see any new inventions; he wanted to carry it all in his own head, probably; h« didn't like ;■ iliare it with too many others. The art of printing, no doubt, has spread knowledge eventually. At the same time the art of printing and reading is of very little value, and may be a great evil to those who do not treat it rightly; those who merely want to get what trash there is in print, if I may say plainly, simply to enjoy the sensation of going though the pages, and deriving no benefit and probably deriving great harm, from reading.

I mean those who cultivate the reading habit —the habit of reading solid books, reflecting on what they read, and above all things, always reading with, a pencil in hand to mark passages to be afterwards copied out into a commonplace book —those are the people that are lifted up and made great by reading ; they get all the benefit of it; they become cultivated people. I never speak in the schools or at a college that I do not say, of all things, to the boys and the girls, to learn the reading habit while they are in school; it will be a solace and a benefit to them all their lives. They are the people that haunt the bookstores looking for books to benefit them; but those who never get the reading habit, but merely read for the momentary sensation of it, derive no benefit from reading.