BOOK-BUYING.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1295, 25 November 1911, Page 9

BOOK-BUYING.

Ad American lady some weeks ago, in order to substantiate in a court of law the assertion that, as a millionaire's wife, she could uot subsist upon less than .£l3 Ss. per day, produced a saraplo budget for a, month, which showed that her expenditure on books was d mere triflo as compared with her expenditure on less intellectual things. Upoa groceries and wines she spent ,£7O, on clothing .£6O, on her motor •K5, on toilet articles £i, on theatre tickets £2, and on books Bs. Now if the books she would get in exchange for Bs.—no doabt thev would bo two novels at a dollar npieco—were all that the' lady read, she was certainly reading too little, but beneath much of the criticism which her statement has awakened in America there lies a fallacy which may be said to date tack to a memorable utterance of Mark Pattison. Pattison, it will be remembered, declared that expenditure on books should be in proportion to income, so that if one ■with a salary of .SIOCO a year spent less than ,£'so od books he was not doing his duty. Evidently tho principle is not above criticism. -Suppose one has the income mentioned, but in the earning of it finds ho has little time left for reading, is he going to cqntiiuio buying books? If he does ho will pile up about him heaps upon heaps of volumes which will mean nothing to his affections and count for nothing as culture. They may be. chosen with a view to their effect as furniture, of cour.-e, and that is one legitimate function of books; one may even have a personal opinion that a house without a good supply of books is a body without a soul. But if one is of another mind I can no more blame him for it than T can blati-e him for not sharing with me a passion for Chippendale chairs or Sheffield plate. The truth is that to glorify the mere buying of books is jiisfone degree worse than tho more familiar glorification of mere reading. Physicians tell their dyspeptic patients that it is not what they eat but I what they digest, that they profit by, and it is so in tho matter of reading. The ■ right principle upon which to regulate expenditure on books is to proportionate it to one's powers of assimilation, and as a matter of fact it is upon that principle that most people unconsciously act.