In the days before the coming of industry, before the
time of the mad awakening, the towns of the Middle
West were sleepy places devoted to the practice of the old
trades. In the morning the old men of the towns went
forth to work in the fields or to the practice of carpentry,
horse-shoeing, wagon-making, harness repairing, and the
making of suits of clothing. They read books and believed
in a God born in the brains of men who came out of a
civilization much like their own. . . . ^*

THE books read by that enormous group of Americans who
were (and are) Sears' customers afford rich and endless
clues to their character, their ambitions, their ways of think-
ing their habits and customs. The old maxim, "Tell me what
you read and I'll tell you what you are," may be faulty in that
it is perhaps too broad. It can hardly be denied, however, that
what a man or a nation reads is an important factor in assess-
ing the character of that man or nation. For these reasons,
the books bought by Sears' customers over a period of thirty
years, the changing reading habits of this large group, and
the criteria by which books were judged are considered at
some length.

When the general catalog of 1905 apportions the enormous
space of sixteen pages to books, and Sears issues in addition
a special book catalog, the inevitable conclusion is that thou-
sands of families bought hundreds of thousands of books by
mail.

The times were favorable for readers and mail-order book-

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