This is New Year, traditionally the season for good resolutions. Few good resolutions are made; fewer are kept. One of the most influential of all resolutions is the resolution continually to freshen one's interest in one's books. This resolution should be made, and it should be kept. Therefore I am specially advocating it. The resolution ought to be seriously considered by budding bookmen, and still more seriously by bookmen of experience, accomplished bookmen, and most seriously of all by bookmen who have gathered together extensive libraries. The majority of books in the majority of libraries lie utterly idle, like railway wagons in a siding. They await the reader, and the man who ought to be their reader never glances at them. What is the remedy for this deplorable state of affairs? Surely no man can read all his books all the time? Of course not. But every bookman can allot a certain regular amount of leisure - particularly between solid sustained perusals - to cultivating at least an acquaintance with books which he has not read and probably will never be able to read through. A lot of knowledge can be very pleasurably obtained by an hour's miscellaneous browsing twice or thrice a week. It may not be exact knowledge, but such as it is it enormously assists the formation of the mind and quickens every mental functioning.
Go to your books; pick one out at random, look into it and so on. The process is rather like plucking flowers in an enamel meadow. No higher praise of it is necessary. After an hour or even half an hour of the exercise you will be conscious of stimulation. Let me add that I address this homily to myself as well as others. For I am a sinful neglecter of books, and compassion for them is not one of my major qualities. A man buys a book, rejoices in the purchase of it, sticks it with due ceremony on a shelf, and it vanishes from his memory. That vile man is myself.
It occurs to me as I write that I have had little or no experience of bookwomen. Are there bookwomen? Certainly I have seen women buying books, and there are noticeably more women than men who serve in public libraries, but do women collect books? I have also noticed, now I come to think of it, that I often get what my mother used to call an 'old-fashioned look' from ladies when I speak of my books in mixed company. Not that women fail to take books seriously; quite the opposite. Many women of my acquaintance are great readers and hold interesting and intelligent views about the books they read, but they seem not to have an interest beyond reading. I have never heard a woman speak of her library.
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