Page:Roads to Childhood (1920).pdf/132

that it should grow to seem a homelike and familiar place to the children of the city. The Brooklyn Public Library, with its unique Brownsville Children’s Branch Library, had not yet come into existence. Many of the children walked miles for their books, or in turn paid car-fare for one boy that he might select books for a group of his friends.

It clearly would not do to circulate books of which we had no first-hand knowledge and recent experience. We were left free to take our own way in bringing books and children of all ages together. We chose the way leading back to our own childhood and its first interests in reading. It may take a long time to get an emotional grasp of the child we used to be, and an intellectual perception of any one of several varieties we might have become in a later generation; but the chase is exhilarating and we recommend the effort to all parents, teachers, and librarians who would really know books in their relation to growing children.

I was not a bookish child, I discovered,