Your Boy's Books by Walter Prichard Eaton

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Dec 23, 1915

Your Boy's Books

By Walter Prichard Eaton

If any apology were needed for reprinting, in the Home department of our church paper, the following stirring article by Walter Prichard Eaton, in a recent number of the Woman's Home Companion, it may perhaps be found in the fact that on a recent Sabbath afternoon the editor saw, in two Seventh-day Adventist homes, two volumes of one of the series referred to below. In one, the book was provided for a lad of fifteen; in the other, it was being eagerly read by a child of ten. Boys will read, and so will girls, and they will read what interests them. It is the part of wisdom for parents to recognize this fact, and not to miss the golden opportunity, which comes but once, of cultivating in their children a wholesome, happy taste in books, which will be at once a guide and a safeguard to them in all the days to come.

“You wouldn’t let your twelve-year-old boy read a nickel novel, one of those ‘yellow backs’ with pictures of Indians and ‘bad men’ on the covers, would you?—that is, not if you knew it. You wouldn’t give such a book to your Sabbath-school class of boys, would you? You would be ashamed of yourself, either as parent or teacher—ashamed and humiliated. Nevertheless, the chances are that as parent or teacher you may be doing just these things. Ignorantly, with the best of intentions, you are letting your boy read, or helping other boys to read, this cheap, sensational fiction, which is to good reading exactly what whisky is to milk. You are giving your boy, or somebody else’s boy, whisky instead of milk, poison instead of food.

“The reason you are doing it—or, if not you, thousands and thousands of other American parents and teachers—is because the sales of the old-fashioned dime and nickel novel have fallen off below the margin of profit, and the publishers are now issuing these dime and nickel novels bound in boards, often pretty well printed, and are selling them from a quarter to as high as seventy-five cents, not so much directly to the boys, as of old, but to the parents. These ‘thrillers’ have now the external air of literary respectability, and because they are cheap, parents and teachers all over the land buy them without realizing their real content.

“I have on my desk at this moment a book which sells for a nickel, and would be burned in the stove by any careful parent. The volume is issued as a single number of a weekly periodical (‘an ideal publication for the American youth,’ it calls itself!), each number of this weekly being a book of cheap adventure written by the same author. On the back cover is a list of ‘some of the back numbers which can be supplied,’ and the list embraces between two and three hundred stories of adventure about two brothers. It is obvious on a moment’s reflection that any ‘author’ who can write hundreds of adventure stories about two boys has no regard whatever for the probabilities, or even the possibilities, of actual existence. Indeed, these lurid yarns have long been known for what they are by all who have investigated them.

“But also on my desk is a book of over three hundred pages, with a well-printed ‘jacket’ showing an attractive picture of boys playing football and baseball, and bearing inside the imprint of a Philadelphia publishing house. The type and paper are not bad. The whole get-up is sufficiently respectable to make the book physically desirable as a present, and the price is only fifty cents, which, of course, adds to the desirability.

“This book is by the very same author who supplies the material for the

‘weekly’ already mentioned, and the hero is the same hero. In short, this good-looking fifty-cent book is nothing more nor less than an old nickel novel in a dress suit. The hero, supposedly a student at Yale, still has the same procession of impossible and lurid adventures from one end of the continent to the other. The same pernicious elements of coarse language, cheap style, unguarded sex references, and impossible deeds of prowess fill it from cover to cover. It ought to go in the stove just as quickly as its nickel brother. Yet it is probably sold by bookshops that wouldn’t handle the cheap ‘yellow backs,’ and it is bought by heedless parents and teachers who wouldn’t dream of giving its prototype to their sons or pupils, any more than they’d give them cocaine or whisky.

“The other day, in Massachusetts, I went down to our local store where books are sold, and for twenty-five cents bought a neat volume called ‘Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone.’ The man who sold it to me wouldn’t dream of selling the nickel thrillers. Yet I discovered that the Tom Swift series is nothing but nickel thrillers in disguise.

“The author, in chapter two, leaves an aeroplane tangled on the roof, and thus clumsily interrupts his narrative:—

“And while preparations are under way to rescue the birdman from the roof, I will take just a few minutes to tell you something more about Tom Swift and his numerous inventions, as set forth in the previous books of this series.”

“We learn that Tom Swift—who is supposed, mind you, to be scarcely more than a boy—has made enough marvelous inventions to crowd Edison into the kindergarten class, and has had more adventures than Sinbad the Sailor. . . .

“To let boys read such impossible rubbish is nothing short of a crime. It destroys their sense of realism, it atrophies their powers of literary appreciation, it debauches their imaginations, it makes science contemptible.

“I could go on, enumerating and quoting from a host of boys’ books that I have read personally, all of which are nothing but dime or nickel novels in disguise, often written by the very men who used to write the yellow backs; but often, too, with the language toned down to a deceptive aping of literary models—being, therefore, all the more stiff and wooden—and with bits of moral sentiment tossed in here and there, perhaps to catch the eye of adult readers who might skim the pages as a precautionary measure. Many of these books are ‘boy scout’ stories; but needless to say no true scout master would buy them for his troop. In them boy scouts fly over the Rocky Mountains in aeroplanes as easily as a real scout rides his bicycle to school; they capture robber bands in Mexico; they range from the arctic ice to the jungles of the Amazon without the slightest trouble. . . .

“As I have hinted, the reason these books sell in such quantities is because they are cheap, and parents and teachers are careless. While it is no longer true that reprints of good books cannot be purchased for twenty-five or fifty cents, at the same time good new fiction for boys is usually sold at a higher price.

“Any good teacher or wise parent knows, of course, that mere prohibition is an ineffective and silly weapon. Not ‘Don’t’ but ‘Do,’ not prohibition but suggestion, is the method to apply. Give the young boy books, give him plenty of books, let him read and browse, and have his fill of adventure—but, see that those books are the right sort. Find out what they are like yourself before you put them into your son’s hands. They may be dynamite, as Franklin Matthews says, to blow your boy’s brains out. Don’t sacrifice his brains, his imagination, all his chances of future literary taste, sense of style, appreciation of good writing, for the sake of saving fifty cents.

“You can tell very easily whether the books are the right sort, simply by reading them. If the style is crude and coarse, if the plot and incidents are not conducted with that due regard to sequence and probability which characterizes the work of any genuine author, if the adventures are not within the possible powers of the boys in the story, and are not wholesome in their suggestion, if the manner of narration hasn’t ease and charm and the sense of good breeding and clean character behind it—throw the book into the fire. Let this be your motto: Read before you buy!”