TURNING TO BOOKS

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 17949, 29 November 1932, Page 3

TURNING TO BOOKS

PEOPLE IN DEPRESSION

VALUABLE DEVELOPMENT

Forced by the .depression to economise, people in England have turned seriously during the last- or two to books and reading. .Miss Nellie M. Scanlan, the New Zealand novelist, who has been in England for some years, regards the development in several respects as a good and valuable one. She. spoke of it on her return to New Zealand bv the Rangitane. •One' feature of the depression, she

said, was that people had had to cut down their expenditure and eliminate costly luxuries. Book buying, however, had not decreased very much, and this, she thought, had been “almost a good thing in a way.” People had turned to reading as a form of enjoyment. They no longer found it possible to go to many dances, cabarets, or to spend their time in similar amusements, and instead of so doing they bought books or joined libraries. Many little shops certainly one or move m any small shopping centre —kept a circulating library. The result was that there were libraries everywhere, and in the case of chains of shops a hook could he borrowed in one town and returned in the next, which was of advantage to travellers. People were consequently reading a nival deal more, Miss Scanlan said, not only tbe new books, but the old ones too?, “hi Die last year or two,” she remarked, “many wim previously spent their time in a gay and frivolous Jashion have found, through books, a new world to live in.”

The general standard of writing was now very high, she continued, and the very fact that more people were beginning to read kept it so. •'I think it is a very good thing,” Miss Scanlan said. “It is only by reading of other countries and other times that people who feel that the present depression is making the world tumble to pieces realise that a hundred years ago the world was passing through the same sort of thing. People are getting a better perspective by reading.”