Some 1923 Books

Though the publisher may resort, out of office hours, to books that have taken their ultimate place in and as literature, and may even bear his part in providing the young with pabulum of proved capacity to nourish good taste and established standards, he must traffic at his desk with books that are yet to be, books with all their fortunes still to make. The first month of the new year is a good time to begin talking about the 1923 books of the Atlantic Monthly Press. Readers of the Atlantic have already savored the quality of two of them. One of these will be called America of Yesterday, as Reflected in the Journal of John Davis Long, Governor of Massachusetts, Secretary of the Navy. The editor of this volume is Mr. Lawrence Shaw Mayo, formerly assistant dean and a member of the department of history in Harvard College, anti the author of admirable lives of Lord Jeffrey Amherst and John Wentworth, subjects demanding an ample background of knowledge in the field of New England history. One chapter of the Long Journal was printed in the December Atlantic; another appears in this issue The earlier portion of the book is indeed of the day before yesterday — the period before the Civil War when the country boy who was to become Secretary of the Navy came down from Maine to Harvard College and began his legal career in Boston. In the later chapters — truly reflecting the America of yesterday — the McKinley Cabinet, the conduct of the Spanish War, the impetuous young Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, who quitted Washington for what Mr. Dooley used to call ‘Cubia,’ all receive fresh illumination in the journals of Long. The book will be both a human and an historical document of substantial value and interest.

Another book now in process of manufacture is The Quare Women, by Lucy Furman, certain chapters of which, published in the Atlantic, have already made a host of friends for the author and the people and scenes that form her subjects. For many years Miss Furman has devoted herself to settlement work in the Kentucky mountains. One book, Mothering on Perilous, dealing memorably with the same scenes and personal types, proceeded from her pen some years ago. Both America of Yesterday, and The Quare Women, a story of an American yesterday which exists to-day, will appear in the spring of 1923.

At the same time we expect to publish also Dr. Johnson: A Play, by Mr. A. Edward Newton, mentioned in these pages several months ago. Some intimation of its remarkable character was then given. The text is, truly, and quite literally, of the eighteenth century, and its form will be made to represent the same period with unusual faithfulness and beauty. Of all this more anon. For the present it is enough to say that a copy of Mr. Newton’s second Atlantic book, A Magnificent Farce (1921), inscribed by the author, fetched the price of twentv-two dollars at an October sale of first editions in New York. Apparently the collector who fails to provide himself with ail early copy of Dr. Johnson will have to pay for his negligence.