The theatre buildings are magnificent. Modern, airy buildings with comfortable seats and all new improvements that make the sojourn in a showhouse delightful. But the moving pictures shown are again on the level of newspaper fiction stories, of church sermons and of best-selling novels. The millionaire, who is a villain and becomes an honest working man, the poor woman who marries a millionaire, despite his upstart mother’s protests, the cowboy who “cleans up” a mining camp and kills a dozen rowdies in order to sink exhausted in the arms of his boyhood sweetheart whom he had deserted years ago ... and men, women and children sit through all this. To have dinners by the light of orange-colored candles while sitting on the floor or on the pillows gracefully grouped about an anaemic poet, who reads ephemeral languid stanzas, belongs to the good taste required in the best circles of Milwaukee. Smocks and bobbed hair have just made their appearance, and an Art Magazine will soon add the final touches of estheticism. Small gift shops have been opened by enterprising dealers from Chicago, and there will be food for amusement for years in Milwaukee. But who will come to this one and to hundreds of other towns and give these good helpless people what they want? Good books, good plays, good movies and a chance to express their individualities in a healthy, pleasant way? 1919 New York Book Magnates “If I were rich,” said a well-to-do broker to me recently, “I’d spend a few hours every day in one of those book dens on Fifth Avenue. Their proprietors are delightful people; the surroundings are as comfortable as a club library. Only it is so intimate there, and they always seem to have the very things that one wants--and they are so darned expensive. They seem to be in touch with the whole world, and the mere fact that they always have new things whenever I drop in is sufficient proof that the genus of book-worms is not on the dying-out list, and that people buy costly books even in our times of so many other lures.” Of course, there are book buyers today who expend thousands and thousands of dollars for rare books, but whom we would not class with the enthusiastic broker who wished to be rich in order to be able to follow his hobby. Rich men often buy their books as investments. They have their brokers who attend auctions for them, and one day we read that Mr. So-and-So bought such-and-such a book for a staggering sum of money, and six months later we receive a catalogue from an auction house telling us that the very same “book lover” will dispose of “duplicates” from his library at auction. And, lo! we find the very same much-advertised rare book in this catalogue. If we compare the price he receives with the price he paid several months ago; we will invariably understand why a stock gambler was induced to become a book-lover.