The homeless man reads a certain amount of religious literature, but little of it is perused in the spirit hoped for by the mission worker or street evangelist. He reads it because it is handed to him and it kills time. Short-story magazines are popular. Next to short-story magazines would come railroad or engineering journals and other magazines dealing with popular mechanics. [Illustration: MEMBERS OF THE JEFFERSON PARK INTELLIGENTSIA] [Illustration: THE HOBO READS PROGRESSIVE LITERATURE] Sex stories are, of course, popular. The tramp has a preference for books of adventure and action. Jack London is the most widely read of novelists among the “bos.” Books on mechanics, _How to Run an Automobile_, _Uses of the Steel Square_, _Block Signal Systems_, _Gas Engines_, have a wide sale. Works on phrenology, palmistry, Christian Science, hypnotism, and the secrets of the stars, etc., are of perennial interest. Joke books and books explaining tricks with cards or riddles, detective stories, and books in the field of the social sciences are surprisingly popular. Bookstores patronized by tramps keep in stock special pocket-size editions of works on sociology, economics, politics, and history. The radical periodicals recommend books to the serious-minded hobo reader. Following is a list from the _Hobo News_: _Easy Outlines on Economics_, by Noah Ablett _A Worker Looks at History_, by Mark Starr _Philosophical Essays; Positive Outlines of Philosophy_, by J. Dietzgen Among the books recommended for the proletariat in the I.W.W. literature list for April, 1922, are the following: _The Ancient Lowly_, C. Osborne Ward _Ancient Society_, Lewis H. Morgan _Capital_, Karl Marx _Capital Today_, Herman Cahn _The Economic Causes of War_, Achille Loria _Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History_, Antonio Labriola _Evolution of Man_, Wilhelm Boelache _Evolution of Property_, Paul Lafargue _Social and Philosophical Studies_, Paul Lafargue _Stories of the Great Railroads_, Charles Edward Russell _The Universal Kinship_, J. Howard Moore _History of Great American Fortunes_, Gustavus Myers _History of the Supreme Courts_, Gustavus Myers _Origin of the Family; Private Property and the State_, Frederick Engels _The History of the I.W.W._, Frederic Brissenden These books are kept in stock at the I.W.W. headquarters and extensively sold and read by the intellectuals. Soap-box orators get fuel for the fires they seek to kindle from books of this sort. It is common knowledge on the “stem” that one can tell the books a speaker reads by the opinions he expresses and the programs he favors. THE HOBO WRITER