There would be fewer bad books in the world if readers were properly informed and warned of their character; and we may believe that the really vicious books would soon cease to exist if their makers and publishers were popularly regarded with the same detestation as other corrupters of the public morals. “He who has published an injurious book,” says Robert South, “sins, as it were in his very grave; corrupts others while he is rotting himself.” Addison says much the same thing: “Writers of great talents, who employ their parts in propagating immorality, and seasoning vicious sentiments with wit and humor, are to be looked upon as the pests of society and the enemies of mankind. They leave books behind them to scatter infection and destroy their posterity. They act the counterparts of a Confucius or a Socrates, and seem to have been sent into the world to deprave human nature, and sink it into the condition of brutality.”⁵

And William Cobbett is still more severe in his denunciation. In his “Advice to Young Men,” he says: “I hope that your taste will keep you aloof from the writings of those detestable villains who employ the powers of their mind in debauching the minds of others, or in endeavors to do it. They present their poison in such captivating forms that it requires great virtue and resolution to withstand their temptations; and they have, perhaps, done a thousand times as much mischief in the world as all the infidels and atheists put together. These men ought to be held in universal abhorrence, and never spoken of but with execration.”

But the shunning of bad books is only one of the problems presented to us in the choice of our reading. In the great multitude of really good and valuable books, how shall we choose those which are of the most vital importance to us to know? The universal habit of desultory reading – reading simply to be entertained – is a habit not to be indulged in, nor encouraged, by scholars or by those who aspire to the station of teachers. There are perhaps a score of books which should be read and studied by every one who claims the title of reader; but, aside from these, each person should determine, through a process of rigid self-examination, what course of reading and what books are likely to produce the most profitable results to him. Find out, if possible, what is your special bent of mind. What line of inquiry or investigation is the most congenial to your taste or mental capacity? Having determined this question, let your reading all centre upon that topic of study which you have made your own, – let it be Literature, Science, History, Art, or any of the innumerable subdivisions of these subjects. In other words, choose a specialty, and follow it with an eye single to it alone.

Says Frederic Harrison: “Every book that we take up without a purpose is an opportunity lost of taking up a book with a purpose; every bit of stray information which we cram into our heads without any sense of its importance is for the most part a bit of the most useful information driven out of our heads and choked off from our minds… We know that books differ in value as much as diamonds differ from the sand on the sea-shore, as much as our living friend differs from a dead rat. We know that much in the myriad-peopled world of books – very much in all kinds – is trivial, enervating, inane, even noxious. And thus, where we have infinite opportunities of wasting our effort to no end, of fatiguing our minds without enriching them, of clogging the spirit without satisfying it, there, I cannot but think, the very infinity of opportunities is robbing us of the actual power of using them… To know anything that turns up is, in the infinity of knowledge, to know nothing. To read the first book we come across, in the wilderness of books, is to learn nothing. To turn over the pages of ten thousand volumes is to be practically indifferent to all that is good.”⁶

“It is of paramount importance,” says Schopenhauer, “to acquire the art not to read; in other words, of not reading such books as occupy the public mind, or even those which make a noise in the world, and reach several editions in their first and last year of existence. We should recollect that he who writes for fools finds an enormous audience, and we should devote the ever scant leisure of our circumscribed existence to the master-spirits of all ages and nations, those who tower over humanity, and whom the voice of Fame proclaims: only such writers cultivate and instruct us.”⁷

And John Ruskin offers the following pertinent advice to beginners: “It is of the greatest importance to you, not only for art’s sake, but for all kinds of sake, in these days of book deluge, to keep out of the salt swamps of literature, and live on a little rocky island of your own, with a spring and a lake in it, pure and good. I cannot, of course, suggest the choice of your library to you, for every several mind needs different books; but there are some books which we all need, and assuredly, if you read Homer, Plato, Æschylus, Herodotus, Dante, Shakspeare, and Spenser as much as you ought, you will not require wide enlargement of your shelves to right and left of them for purposes of perpetual study. Among modern books, avoid generally magazine and review literature. Sometimes it may contain a useful abridgment or a wholesome piece of criticism; but the chances are ten to one it will either waste your time or mislead you. If you want to understand any subject whatever, read the best book upon it you can hear of; not a review of the book… A common book will often give you much amusement, but it is only a noble book which will give you dear friends.”

If any of us could recall the time which we have spent in desultory and profitless reading, and devote it now faithfully to the prosecution of that special line of study which ought, long ago, to have been chosen, how largely we might add to our fund of useful knowledge, and how grandly we might increase our intellectual stature! “And again,” remarks James Herbert Morse, “if I could recover the hours idly given to the newspaper, not for my own gratification, but solely for my neighbor at the breakfast-table, I could compass a solid course of English and American history, get at the antecedents of political parties in the two countries, and give the reasons for the existence of Gladstone and Parnell, of Blaine and Edmunds, in modern politics – and there is undoubtedly a reason for them all. Two columns a day in the newspapers – which I could easily have spared, for they were given mainly to murder-trials and the search for corpses, or to the romance of the reporter concerning the same – have during the last ten years absorbed just about the time I might have spent in reading a very respectable course in history, – one embracing, say, Curtius and Grote for Greece, Mommsen, Merivale, and Gibbon for Rome, Macaulay and Green for my roots in Saxondom, Bancroft, Hildreth, and Palfrey for the ancestral tree in America, together with a very notable excursion into Spain and Holland with Motley and Prescott, – a course which I consider very desirable, and one which should set up a man of middle age very fairly in historical knowledge. I am sure I could have saved this amount out of any ten years of my newspaper reading alone, without cutting off any portion of that really valuable contribution for which the daily paper is to be honored, and which would be needed to make me an intelligent man in the history of my own times.”⁸

It is not necessary that, in selecting a library or in choosing what you will read, you should have many books at your disposal. A few books, well chosen and carefully read, will be of infinitely more value to you than any miscellaneous collection, however large. It is possible for “the man of one book” to be better equipped in knowledge and literary attainments than he whose shelves are loaded with all the fashionable literature of the day. If your means will not permit you the luxury of a library, buy one book, or a few books, chosen with special reference to the line of reading which you have determined upon. Let no honey-mouthed book-agent persuade you to buy of his wares, unless they bear exactly upon your specialty. You cannot afford to waste money on mere catchpenny or machine publications, whose only recommendation is that they are harmless and that they sell well. That man is to be envied who can say, “I have a library of fifty or of a hundred volumes, all relating to my chosen line of thought, and not a single inferior or worthless volume among them.”

I have before me a list of books, – “books fashioned by the intellect of godlike men,” – books which every person who aspires to the rank of teacher or scholar should regard as his inheritance from the master-minds of the ages. If you know these books – or some of them – you know much of that which is best in the great world of letters. You cannot afford to live in ignorance of them.

Plato’s Dialogues (Jowett’s translation).

The Orations of Demosthenes on the Crown.

Bacon’s Essays.

Burke’s Orations and Political Essays.

Macaulay’s Essays.

Carlyle’s Essays.

Webster’s Select Speeches.

Emerson’s Essays.

The Essays of Elia, by Charles Lamb.

Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott.

David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens.

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray.

Hypatia, by Charles Kingsley.

The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot.

The Marble Faun, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The Sketch Book, by Washington Irving.

Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo.

Wilhelm Meister, by Goethe (Carlyle’s trans.).

Don Quixote, by Cervantes.

Homer’s Iliad (Derby’s or Chapman’s translation).

Homer’s Odyssey (Bryant’s translation).

Dante’s Divina Commedia (Longfellow’s trans.).

Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Shakspeare’s Works.

Mrs. Browning’s Poems.

Longfellow’s Poetical Works.

Goethe’s Faust (Bayard Taylor’s translation).

I have named but twenty-five authors; but each of these, in his own line of thought and endeavor, stands first in the long roll of immortals. When you have the opportunity to make the acquaintance of such as these, will you waste your time with writers whom you would be ashamed to number among your personal friends? “Will you go and gossip with your housemaid or your stable boy, when you may talk with kings and queens, while this eternal court is open to you, with its society wide as the world, multitudinous as its days, the chosen, the mighty, of every place and time? Into that you may enter always; in that you may take fellowship and rank according to your wish; from that, once entered into it, you can never be outcast but by your own fault; by your aristocracy of companionship there, your inherent aristocracy will be assuredly tested, and the motives with which you strive to take high place in the society of the living, measured, as to all the truth and sincerity that are in them, by the place you desire to take in this company of the dead.”⁹