If it is real! Candor compels me to confess that, like some other avowals of love, that of a love for books does not always ring true. “What have you read?” I once asked one of these self-styled book-lovers. She fixed me with her eye and after a moment’s impressive pause she replied “Deep thought!” I mentally marked her as a false lover. Proud parents relate how their progeny in childhood would rather peruse E. S. Ellis than play and pore over Alger than eat--this as irrefragable proof of fitness for a library career. Consideration of cases like these makes us wonder whether the smile is so much out of the way after all. Does the true book-lover publicly announce her affection in the hope of gain? Does she not rather, like Shakespeare’s maid, “never tell her love?” It is to be feared that some of these people are confusing a love of books with a love of reading. They are not the same thing. Some persons enjoy the gentle mental exercise of letting a stream of more or less harmless ideas flow through their brains--continuously in and continuously out again--apprehending them one after another in lazy fashion, and then dismissing them. The result is a degree of mental friction, but no permanent intellectual acquisition. How much of our own reading is of this kind I shudder to contemplate. Far be it from me to condemn it; it has its uses; it is an excellent cure for wakefulness after a busy day; but it no more indicates or stimulates a love for books than shaking hands with a thousand callers makes it possible for the Governor or the President to claim them all as intimate friends. A real love for books, after all, is betrayed rather than announced; it shows itself in the chance remark, the careless action, just as another kind of love may show itself in a glance or a word. I believe this to be the reason why a love for books is so little considered among the modern qualifications of librarianship; it appears in acts, not in words; it cannot be ascertained by asking questions. He who protests that he has it must needs be an object of suspicion. And yet I venture to say that if any librarian has made a conspicuous success of his work, apart from the mere mechanics of it, he has achieved that success primarily and notably through love of books. This I assert to be the case down to the assistant of lowest grade. To be good, work must be ungrudging. And though other things than love for one’s task may make one willing to do it and able to do it well, intelligent interest is always a prime factor in securing the best results.