Page:The small library. A guide to the collection and care of books (IA smalllibraryguid00browiala).pdf/47

 ing out lists of so-called 'Best Books', as aids to selection, because opinions differ so much, and compilers look at the question from so many standpoints. The useful, but huge, lists of Mr. Swan Sonnenschein are at one end of the row, and the select lists of fifty or a hundred best books, compiled by Lord Avebury (when Sir John Lubbock) and many others, are at the other extreme. Some of these selections are useful as suggestions, but most of the smaller lists are overburdened by a straining after what is regarded as high literary quality, which makes them very austere and forbidding. Lord Avebury's List of a Hundred Books, for example, contains many items which are unsuited for a general household library, or indeed for the library of any one save the special student. It aims too high, and is dull and impractical in consequence. Most of the other select lists published are marred by the same defects. They are efforts to show the compiler's catholicity and profundity rather than practical attempts to direct attention to good books which will instruct, elevate, and divert. Imagine any one, after a hard day's work in an office or factory, coming home to read Wake's Apostolic Fathers or Bacon's Novum Organum! There is a limit to human endurance in the task of reading for instruction's sake alone, and it is reached when lists of good books are drawn chiefly from pagan philosophers and divers religious cranks of varying degrees of interest and value. The books which will interest most people are those which make some kind of direct appeal to their