"All this reading!" is actually a quotation from one of Barbara Pym's novels, its significance being - I think - that the heroine does not really "rate" reading as a pastime and rather despises herself for doing it. Time was that many people, especially women, felt that way. How dare they read when they could be doing the dusting! Things have not got a lot better in that regard. I once shared an office with a woman who was setting up a computer dating profile. When asked to state her hobbies, she put down "reading", which caused great hilarity among the rest of us, who had observed her addiction to the most scurrilous stories in Hello! and similar publications but knew that she had not picked up a book since her schooldays. At least when the characters in Pym novels mention reading, we can assume they are talking about poetry, novels, or learned non-fiction.
Issue number 36 of Siegfried's Journal will soon be "put to bed" after the usual frantic last-minute adjustments, and we know that our members love reading it. Siegfried himself was of course a considerable reader; even the word "voracious" seems somehow inadequate to describe the way he consumed books and the pleasure he got out of them. As a youth, he bought them, read them, and, when his money ran out, sold them to get the funds to buy more, recording the purchases meticulously in a notebook.
Public libraries at the turn of the twentieth century were not plentiful. The work of the Carnegie Trust began during the First World War, with a general aim of improving public well-being; its funds came from the Scottish-born entrepreneur, Andrew Carnegie. Say what you like about Carnegie's failures in the area of industrial relations, he recognised how learning could raise people out of the vicious circle of poverty, and he gave away millions of dollars to try to help others obtain an education. Carnegie himself, born in a one-roomed cottage in Dunfermline, had benefited from the existence of a Free School, founded in the town by a local philanthropist. His name is nowadays closely associated with the public library system in Britain.
In 2012, over 200 public libraries closed in the UK, and many others are now existing on a staff consisting largely of volunteers. Mobile libraries are almost a thing of the past, since it is assumed that everyone has a car and can go and visit their nearest branch - which may of course be many miles away. Book exchange has become a popular substitute, and of course e-readers are playing their part, both in the decline of library services and in the resurgence of reading as a hobby. (But on the London Underground, you will still see more people playing games on their phones than using their Kindle devices.) The way we read has changed subtly: there are more distractions and attention spans are becoming shorter. Schools and churches no longer award books as prizes; children would look askance if they were presented with a dictionary or a book of poems (though some might be satisfied at receiving the latest David Walliams or Philip Pullman).
I don't know if this is something to worry about. I think that Siegfried would have found it a concern. His work depended for its popularity on being read, in book form; he was never happy reading his poems to an audience, though many of his contemporaries did so. He sought out others who enjoyed reading as much as he did - men like Robert Graves, who later claimed to have spotted Sassoon because he owned a copy of the Essays of Lionel Johnson. As he pointed out, there would not be many young officers who would be anxious to read a book by an author like Johnson, a repressed homosexual, Catholic convert and a sympathiser with the Irish independence movement. Johnson was an admirer of Thomas Hardy, and this would have been an additional attraction for Sassoon and Graves.
By the end of his life, Sassoon owned an enormous library so presumably he didn't need to go out and borrow books. It is well attested that he could tell a visitor exactly where on his many shelves to find a particular title and describe it in detail. Many trained librarians get to know their stock well enough to be able to do the same, but the skill is in decline.
By coincidence, I have just learned about the existence of a new magazine called "Chapter Catcher", which contains serendipitously-collected chapters and other short pieces from a number of sources, in order to encourage less dedicated readers to go on and find the original work. To quote the founder, "the idea is to get people to read wider and deeper. It is taking people on a journey." Anything's worth a try.
