“Even a cursory survey of modern school readers soon reveals that no period in the whole world’s literature has been neglected as a source of selection. We have majestic passages from the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, and Bunyan. The later centuries of English literature afford the names of Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, Browning, Dickens, Thackeray, and on to Tennyson and Stevenson. The early classic American period contributes freely from Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Thoreau, and Irving, and our early patriots and philosophers like Washington, Patrick Henry, Franklin, and Lincoln, live to-day in the school readers. Even our modern authors have their place. James Whitcomb Riley, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Joel Chandler Harris, and a score of others are no strangers to the child who has in his possession a school reader of the present day. If these were not enough, we have occasional excursions into the Greek and Roman myths, and for the little people touches of the fascinating German and Scandinavian folklore. “Most wonderful of all, however, is the skill of the editors and publishers of these modern readers in selecting from this world-wide galaxy of authors just the particular poem, tale, or episode that the childish mind can assimilate and digest, and thus be left not only with an introduction to these famous authors, but better yet with a desire to know more of them.” Recently it was my pleasure to examine the illustrations in a set of modern school readers. I found in them a number of pictures beautifully done in color, copied from some of the masterpieces of world-famous artists, as, for instance, _The Age of Innocence_, by Reynolds, _The Blue Boy_, Gainsborough, _The Melon Eaters_, Murillo, _Portrait of a Man_, Franz Hals, _King David_, Rubens, _Mona Lisa_, Leonardo da Vinci, _The Tapestry Weavers_, Velasquez, _The Architect_, Rembrandt, as well as many others made from drawings cleverly done by artists of manifest ability. The pictures in this series of readers were evidently selected with as much care as the text, which contained selections of high literary value. “If I were asked,” said James Russell Lowell, “what book is better than a cheap book, I should answer that there is one book better than a cheap book, and that is a book honestly come by.”