General ...t. مترجمة No. 1. THE READER OCTOBER, 1925 I Editorial N the Middle Ages readers were rare and books even rarer. Chaucer regarded his Clerk of Oxford as a man of a vast scholarship; did not his library consist of Twenty bookés clad in black or red Of Aristotle and his philosophy? The modern "clerk" of Oxford would think himself poorly provided with a working library of but two thousand volumes. In those days a reader was indeed so valuable to the community that he was taken under the protection of the Church and allowed "benefit of clergy"; and many a man who could satisfy the ordinary that he could read some verses from the Fifty-first Psalm was thereby delivered from the gallows. But in the twentieth century, when books are numberless, the problem is to find the best books. Over twelve thousand new books are now published each year in England alone. Many, of course, are technical or scientific; but still the bulk of what claims to be considered "good reading" is enormous, and it is not surprising if many who realize the value of reading stand a little helplessly before this ceaseless stream of printed matter. ence. This, we believe, is the justification for THE READER'S existIt neither leads nor follows any particular school, group, or clique. Its purpose is simply to point out the best books in our literature, new and old, to suggest lines of reading, and to help those who wish for some guidance. Readers tend to divide themselves into two groups, optimists and pessimists. The pessimist holds that the enjoyment of good literature is the privilege of the few rare spirits who alone are capable of understanding and he would confine the knowledge of books to his own narrow circle. This attitude, in one form or another, is very common. There are many, for instance, who lament the "uselessness" of education and who believe, in the words of a certain newspaper, that "so far as nine-tenths of the population are concerned, sufficient arithmetic to prevent them being swindled, and sufficient knowledge to read the newspaper is all they aspire to." If this opinion is true, our nation is intellectually bankrupt, for "a great Empire and little minds go ill together." We are, however, on the side of the optimists; we believe that B |