The Sillier the Better

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 5, 1882

The Sillier the Better.

THE Chicago Advance discoursing on novel reading, says:—

An investigation at one of the circulating libraries recently revealed some significant facts. There were three thousand volumes in the library, and they were all fiction. Not a sign of anything else! "A book of any other character would be so much dead loss," was the remark of the Librarian. "I must buy the books that people read or I could not live.

"And what are the books that people read?"

"Oh! Mrs. Southworth's, Miss Fleming's, Mary J. Holmes' Miss Braddon's, etc. Mrs Southworth's are the most popular. I have two full sets of them, and could easily use three. They are always out."

"What about Macdonald, George Elliot, Dickens, Thackeray, Black, Hawthorne, etc.?"

"I keep them, of course. I have to, for they are sometimes called for, and by a class of customers that I like to oblige. But I make no profit on them. The sillier a story is the more eagerly it is caught up and read."

"Are your customers mostly young people?"

"No. There are as many middle-aged and old men and women as there are young people, and the silliest novels are as eagerly read by the old as by the young."

"Do you notice in your regular customers—those you have had for years—any improvement in literary taste? Do they call for a higher class of reading than they did five or ten years ago?"

"Very seldom indeed. Those who liked the lower class sixteen years ago, like it still."