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Canadian Authors' Club, Toronto.

I am very glad to be here among my colleagues, and I am delighted to have the chance of saying a word to you on the most important enterprise which you are undertaking.

I think I may say that in my time I have been engaged in almost every task concerned with the printed word. I have been, and I am, a writer. I have been a printer and a paper-maker and a publisher, and I have been a trustee of more than one library. There must be three agents in every industry, the producer, the distributor and the consumer. Well, this gathering represents, so far as the book trade is concerned, every type of producer and distributor - author, publisher, bookseller and librarian. That is to say, we have both those who make books and those who assist in getting books to those who want them.

I am not going to praise my own particular calling of writer; but I should like to pay my tribute to our colleagues. We authors, like the coneys in the Bible, are a feeble folk, but we have our dwelling in the rocks; and by the rocks I znean the publishers, the booksellers and the librarians. The other day I was reading in the works of Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty. You remember Sir Thomas? He was a great eccentric and he is said to have died of laughing on hearing of the restoration of Charles II. One of his performances was to attempt to reconstruct the Resurrection by lying in a coffin, having himself drawn up by ropes at sunrise to the top of a tall tower, while four men blew on trumpets. He was perhaps a little mad. But he was a great scholar, and in his translation of Rabelais he has produced, I think, one of the best translations in any language. I found this

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passage in his writings: he is pleading that the State should institute everywhere public libraries, and among other reasons he gives the following:- "Besides the good that would thereby redound to all good spirits, it might provide a special encouragement to the stationer and the printer; the one being the noblest profession among merchants and the other among artificers." Surely that is a compliment worth having!

The object of' our enterprise is to encourage and assist what reading public already exists in Canada, and, above all, to increase it. The two main obstacles in our task are first the cost of books, and second the difficulty of' people, living remote f'rom the larger centres, knowing what books are published which might interest them, and in getting hold of' them easily. The first is a permanent difficulty, especially in bad times. I think myself that books are relatively cheaper than any other commodity, but still, they cost money. In bad times they are perhaps the first luxury that most people drop. There will always be specialist books which have a practical value, and for which people are willing to pay. But, in addition to such works, there is an enormous amount of good general literature in every department , and in recent years there has been a wonderful movement in cheapening such books. A quarter of a century ago I myself in Britain had some hand in it when we first published novels at sevenpence. What we want is to get information about what is available right down to everybody, so that a man, however remote his dwelling may be, may know what books are available on the subject of' his special interest, and what can be had for general reading. That is the first step in our campaign,

3· to provide for proper information and for easy distribution.

We have a second task, and that is to impress upon everybody the importance of the reading habit. That requires, perhaps, subtler and more varied methods, but it is a task which, if we properly decentralise our activities, can be performed in some degree by every one of us. Speaking as one who, till a few years ago, was a publisher, I have been enormously struck by the iwnense growth of the reading habit in Britain since the War. Books, which before 1914 had only a small and slow circulation, now sell as largely as a popular novel did in the old days. If I am not egotistical in taking a personal example, I would instance my own Cromwell and my book called The King's Grace. The reason why the War had such an effect upon reading was partly, I think, the cutting off of other methods of amusement. But even more it was due to the fact that so great a crisis made people think. Reading induces thought, but also thought induces the habit of reading. When the mind is awakened it looks naturally for guidance and assistance from the thought of the past, and that thought is enshrined in books.

Now a time of depression has the same spiritual effect as a time of war. It gives many people an enforced leisure. It awakens in everybody an inclination to turn their minds to the graver issues of life. It also makes necessary a certain mental relaxation, the opportunity of turning away from the difficulties of everyday life to the happier world of the imagination. Now we and the whole world have been going through a time of depression and I think that is the reason why the interest in reading, stimulated by the War, has not relaxed since the War. We have a chance today which we did not have in

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the old days of bringing home to all classes the immense consolation and profit to be derived from books.

In a country like Canada with great distasnces and in many parts a sparse populaiton, this is not going to be an easy task. In some of the Western Provinces you have a large section of the population to whom English is still a strange language. These new Canadians, drawn from different European nations, are a problem in themselves of great importance, which will want very skilful handling. You will have to deal, too, with people who have not much of a literary education behind them, and in whom the reading habit can be only slowly developed. That is to say, your work will be largely educative - adult education, quite as important a duty as the provision of the right kind of schools for youth. If I may venture a word of advice, you must not be too bookish and try to impress your special tastes upon people who have not the background to give these tastes any meaning. If you are too bookish, too literary in the wrong sense, you will at once become suspect by ordinary folk. You must emphasise the great things which literature can give, and which everyone can understand, and leave out the trimmings. Literary "shop" is not of any more value than any other kind of "shop". I expect you do not suffer in the same way here, but we have far too much of it at home. The small talk of literary people has always bored me. It is perhaps a little better than golf "shop" or racing "shop 11 or the tattle of the Stock Exchange; but, if we are to have such small talk, I personally prefer fishing "shop" or mountaineering "shop" or the naturalist's "shop", or the "shop" of practical men like engineers and miners. They seem to be

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more real things and to have a closer relation to the real purpose of literature than mere bookish chatter.

I am not going to give you an address upon the importance of reading; that has been done a hundred times by far better people than myself, and it will be your duty to preach that gospel in your campaign. You can emphasise the practical advantages. Reading makes a man understand the meaning of society, and therefore makes him an intelligent citizen. It teaches him the true foundation of politics. It enables him to examine catchwords and not to be misled by showy formulae. It enables him to take a balanced view of his own difficulties, and to be neither too much of an optimist nor too much of a pessimist. A memory full of good books is the best preventative against both panic and over-confidence. Then there is the practical value of reading as a mental discipline, since it encourages that disinterested intellectual curiosity which is the life- blood of civilisation. All this has been said before, and said far better than I can say it.

But I would emphasise today especially the enrichment which reading gives to our ordinary life, the addition which it makes to our honest pleasures - what I might call the fun of the thing. We often hear it said of somebody that he is a "great reader". But that which is assumed to be so common is, I think, rather rare - the men and women who are so eager to broaden their knowledge of life that they read with real ardour and intelligence. I am very far from advocating that priggish practice which some people favour - a systematic course of reading by which you confine yourself to the