A conservative estimate places the number of books in the world at 4,500,000. (This estimate was made before the war broke out, and the war-books by now have doubtless brought the number to 5,000,000.) This does not mean books as collections of printed sheets of paper bound together—books as physical objects—for if it did the number would be immensely greater. It means 4,500,000 (or more) separate and distinct treatises. If you were to read one book every two weeks, you would read about twenty-five a year, and if you read for fifty years you would cover 1,250. One book in every three thousand six hundred! (3,600!) From this it is apparent that even the most omnivorous reader, even the reader who can cover a book swiftly by efficient skipping, will at least have to ask himself before beginning a volume, “Is this a book in a thousand? Can I afford to read this at the cost of missing nine hundred and ninety-nine others?” And most men who ask this question will have to substitute the number five thousand, or even ten thousand. Nine-tenths of our reading is on mere chance recommendation, passing whim or by sheer accident. We catch sight of a book on a library table. Having nothing better to do we pick it up; we start perusing it. Every book read in this way means a sinful waste of time. To be sure, a book read in this chance manner _might_ (accidentally) be very good—even better than some you would have planned for; but this will happen seldom, and is never a justification of the practice. By going a round about way to a place a man might stumble across a lost pocketbook, but this would not justify taking round about ways. The first thing needed, then, is that we should plan our reading. Perhaps the best way to do this would be to make out a list of the books we intend to read for the coming year, or say a list of from a dozen to twenty-five volumes, and then read them in the order listed. Another good plan is to jot down the title of every book we intend to read, and keep the list about with us. Then when we meet with a book which we think would be good to read, or which we feel we simply must read, we can before starting it glance at our list. The formidable array we find there will probably induce us either to give up entirely our intention to read the book before us, or at least to put it somewhere on the list which will allow more important books to be read first.