The tones of the speaker’s voice fade away and are forever lost. Too often the ideas which the voice proclaimed drift into the background and presently disappear. This is the crowning limitation of public speaking. The lecturer should be, first of all, an educator, and his work should not be “writ in water.” The lazy lecturer who imagines that his duties to his audience end with his peroration is unfaithful to his great calling. Lazy lecturers are not very numerous as they are certain of a career curtailed from lack of an audience.

There are some lecturers, however, who see nothing of importance in their work except the delivering of their lectures. And the educational value of such workers is only a fraction of what it might be. Life is not so long for the strongest of us, nor are the results that can be achieved by the most gifted such that we can afford to waste the best of our opportunities. This article is not intended as a sermon, but if as lecturers we are to be educators we must not neglect to use the greatest weapons against ignorance in the educational armory—books.

The books here referred to are not the volumes in the lecturer’s own library. They, of course, are indispensable. There have been men who felt destined to be lecturers without the use of mere “book learning,” but they never lived long enough to find out why the public did not take them at their own estimate.

The man who undertakes to deal with a subject without first reading, and as far as possible, mastering, the best books on that subject, would no more be a lecturer than a man who tried to cut a field of wheat with a pocket-knife would be a farmer.

Any good lecture of an hour and a quarter has meant ten to fifty hours’ hard reading. There is much in the reading that cannot possibly appear in the lecture. Another lecture on a related theme or one widely different, has probably suggested itself. I remember while rummaging in history to find proofs and illustrations of “The Materialistic Conception of History,” which conception I was to defend presently in a public debate, gathering the scheme of a course of four lectures on the significance of the great voyages of the middle ages—a course which proved very successful when delivered about a month later.

Again, the reading furnishes a great deal of material on the question of the lecture itself which cannot be put into it for sheer lack of time. This is why a lecture always educates the lecturer much more than it does the hearer. The hearer therefore labors under two great disadvantages. First, he forgets much that he hears, and, second, there is so much that he does not hear at all.

The first handicap can be removed by the printing of the lectures. The second is not so easily disposed of.

A lecturer may state in three minutes an idea which has cost many days’ reading. The idea has great importance to the speaker and, if he is a master of his art, he will impress its importance on his hearers. That is what his art is for. But that idea will never illume the hearer’s brain as the lecturer’s until the hearer knows as does the lecturer what there is back of it.

There is only one way in which this can be done—the hearer must have access to the same sources of knowledge as the lecturer. This does not necessarily mean that every hearer should have a lecturer’s library. It does mean, however, that there are some books which should be read by both.

The lecturer himself is the best judge as to which books belong to this category. In number they range anywhere from a dozen up, according to the ambitions of the reader.

My method of dealing with this problem has been to take one book at a time, tell the audience about it and see that the ushers were ready to supply all demands. In this way I have sold more than two whole editions of Boelsche’s book “The Evolution of Man.” In one week speaking in half a dozen different cities I sold an entire edition of my first book “Evolution, Social and Organic.” One Sunday morning this spring at the Garrick meeting at the close of a five-minute talk about Paul Lafargue’s “Social and Philosophic Studies” the audience, in three minutes, bought 250 copies, and more than a hundred would-be purchasers had to wait until the following Sunday for a new supply. A few Sundays later Blatchford’s “God and My Neighbor,” a dollar volume, had a sale of 204 copies—the total book sale for that morning reaching what I believe is the record for a Socialist meeting—$220.00. The last lecture of this season (April, 1910,) had a book sale of $190.00, which included 380 paper back copies of Sinclair’s “Prince Hagen.”

These figures are given to show that this work can be done, and if it is not done the lecturer alone is to blame. Anyone who can lecture at all can do this with some measure of success. There can be no sane doubt of its value. About 500 young men in the Garrick audience have built up small but fine libraries of their own through this advice given in this way, and there is no part of my work which gives me so great satisfaction.

I never allow my audience to imagine for a moment that my book talk is a mere matter of selling something. There will always be one or two in the audience who will take that view—natural selection always overlooks a few chuckle-heads.

Now let us tabulate some of the results that may be obtained in this way:

(1) By getting these books into the hands of our hearers we give our teachings from the platform a greater permanence in their minds. We not only help them to knowledge, but put them in the way of helping themselves directly. This alone is, justification enough, but it is not all.(2) We encourage the publication of just those books which in our estimation contain the principles which we regard as destined to promote the happiness of mankind.

(3) The difference between the wholesale and retail prices is often enough to make successful a lecture course which would have otherwise died prematurely of bankruptcy. Where a meeting cannot live on the collection, the book sales may mean financial salvation. The morning we sold $220 of books at the Garrick we also took a collection of $80. Without the book sales $80 would have been the total receipts, and this collection was normal. Yet the Garrick meetings cost $140 each. After we had paid the publisher’s bill we had a balance from book sales of $120, which made the total receipts not $80 but $200. And this is among the least important results of book selling.

Everything, of course, depends on the book talk. I will now give sample book talks which any speaker may commit to memory and use, probably with results that will be a surprise and an encouragement.