The Book Rescuer
While my role at Legible is generally to curate the catalog, and write and edit newsletters, blog posts, and so on, I also view myself as a book rescuer! Alongside more current books from publishers and classic books from the public domain, we’ve also been turning some mostly unknown books from the public domain into eBooks to read on our site — thus rescuing them from obscurity! Some of these serve only as (often amusing) reminders of an earlier time, while others remain relevant today, such as the first self-help book ever published, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, by Arnold Bennett.
The chief advice of this book is to put oneself on a program of reading in order to improve one’s mind. Certainly good advice in any era! The book advises people to feed their minds instead of wiling away the hours in unproductive and mindless amusements such as reading the newspaper. And in the way Bennett talks about newspapers, we can extrapolate that scrolling through social media performs a similar role for us today. He has some surprisingly current mental health advice for us throughout the book as well, such as how people often say “one can’t help one’s thoughts,” when actually, one can! “The control of the thinking machine is perfectly possible,” Bennett tells us. Or when he notes that “happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure but from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles” (cue cognitive behavioral therapy). His advice to set aside even a small amount of time daily for improvement of our minds is spot on, and doable for our busy lives (people were surprisingly busy in his time period too — it’s not just us!)
The book is highly amusing in a dated way as well, which only makes it more appealing for my readerly sensibilities, such as when it advises people to learn how to make their own breakfast and tea rather than relying on their servant to do so in the morning, so that they can spend some time early in the morning reading: for “the proper, wise balancing of one’s whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.” (I think you can see by now that Bennett’s tone in the book is often purposefully amusing as well as amusing in an accidental, dated way!)
Certainly, some of the advice in the book is outdated in an unpleasant way, such as when Bennett contends that novels are excluded from “serious reading.” And even more problematic is his assumption that all people who can embark upon this mind-improvement program are men. No doubt the women are cooking dinner and caring for the children while the men engage in their nightly 90 minutes of reading time after work! But if you can overlook these dated faux pas, the book does not disappoint!
Keep an eye on Legible and this blog for more quirky finds in the future!
