Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. 10
Those who read no books but new ones have this much to say for themselves in mitigation of censure: they do not read all the new ones. They can not; with the utmost diligence and devotion - never weary in ill doing - they can not hope to get through one in a hundred. This, I should suppose, must make them unhappy. They probably feel as a small boy of limited capacity would in a country with all the springs running treacle and all the trees loaded with preserved fruits.
The annual output of books in this country alone is something terrible - not fewer, I am told, than from seven thousand to nine thousand. This should be enough to gratify the patriot who "points with pride" to the fact that Americans are a reading people, but does not point with anything to the quality of what they read.
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