how many times a book has been borrowed, but this gives us no information about whether it has or has not been read.  Fortunately for our present purpose, however, many works are published in a series of volumes, each of which is charged separately, and an examination of the different slips will tell us whether or not the whole work has been read through by all those who borrowed it.  If, for instance in a two-volume work each volume has gone out twenty times, twenty borrowers either have read it through or have stopped somewhere in the second volume, while if the first volume is charged twenty times and the second only fourteen, it is certain that six of those who took out the first volume did not get as far as the second.  In works of more than two volumes we can tell with still greater accuracy at what point the reader’s interest was insufficient to carry him further.

Such an investigation has been made of all works in more than one volume contained in seven branches of the Brooklyn Public Library, and with very few exceptions it has been found that each successive volume in a series has been read by fewer persons than the one immediately preceding.  What is true of books in more than one volume is presumably also true, although perhaps in a less degree, of one-volume works, although we have no means of showing it directly.  Among the readers of every book, then, there are generally some who, for one reason or other, do not read it to the end.  Our question, “Do readers read?” is thus answered in the negative for a large number of cases.  The supplementary question, “Why do not readers read?” occurs at once, but an attempt to answer it would take us rather too deeply into psychology.  Whether this tendency to leave the latter part of books unread is increasing or not we can tell only by repeating the present investigation at intervals of a year or more.  The probability is that it is due to pure lack of interest.  For some reason or other, many persons begin to read books that fail to hold their attention.  In a large number of cases this is doubtless due to a feeling that one “ought to read” certain books and certain classes of books.  A sense of duty carries the reader part way through his task, but he weakens before he has finished it.

This shows how necessary it is to stimulate one’s general interest in a subject before advising him to read a book that is not itself calculated to arouse and sustain that interest.  Possibly the modern newspaper habit, with its encouragement of slipshod reading, may play its part in producing the general result, and doubtless a careful detailed investigation would reveal still other partial causes, but the chief and determining cause must be lack of interest.  And it is to be feared that instead of taking measures to arouse a permanent interest in good literature, which would in itself lead to the reading of standard works and would sustain the reader until he had finished his task, we have often tried to replace such an interest