Atlantic Shop-Talk

Another President

THREE Presidents in four months! The Atlantic Monthly Press might almost be accused of attempting a corner in Chief Executives. In August it produced, in a diminutive book, Mr. Wilson’s Atlantic essay, ‘The Road away from Revolution.’ In October came Lord Charnwood’s Theodore Roosevelt, which is reviewed in another department of the Atlantic for this month by ‘ the Colonel’s’ college classmate and biographer, Mr. Charles G. Washburn, of Worcester, Massachusetts, who was, besides, a member of Congress during part of Roosevelt’s presidency. Finally, in November, will come a brief biography of President Calvin Coolidge.

The author of this new book is Mr. Edward Elwell Whiting, whose daily production of ‘Whiting’s Column’ in the Boston Herald has made his name and his admirable work known to a multitude of readers.

As a biographer of President Coolidge he stands in a position of peculiar advantage. He hails, as does the President, who entered public life as Mayor of Northampton, from western Massachusetts, where his father, the late Charles Goodrich Whiting, was long an editor of the Springfield Republican. His grandfather — for full measure — was named Calvin Whiting. Passing from Harvard College into journalism, he was himself fortunate in his exceptional opportunities, both in Massachusetts and in Washington, for observing the President at close range throughout the successive stages of his career. His knowledge of political affairs is comprehensive. And he writes with the ease and force from which both good writing and good reading proceed.

It was suggested to Mr. Whiting when he undertook this piece of work that he might be instrumental in solving a public enigma. His book is a positive contribution to that end.

A New Book List

This is the time of year at which our Shop-Talk is wont to contain some discourse reminding the friends of the Atlantic office that the books which have proceeded from it in previous years are still very much alive. As the list of our book publications grows longer — it now includes some hundred and forty titles — this practice can hardly be continued without a certain ‘playing of favorites.’ This is something which we avoid, for if a publishing house with a deliberately restricted list of books does not pursue a method of its own, what becomes of the advantage, to its authors and itself, of a policy of concentration?

Instead, then, of talking at this time of any one or more books of other seasons, we must be content with mentioning the fact that the Atlantic Monthly Press has been taking a special interest in the issue of a new Atlantic Book List, now in process of distribution. In many respects its pages will be found to suggest the identity of aim of the Press and the Atlantic Monthly. It contains a number of portraits of Atlantic authors and reproductions of the illustrations of Atlantic books, with descriptive notes upon their contents. Nobody imagines that all the copies will escape the wastebasket that yawns in every library and office for publishers’ catalogues; but before this one finds its way into that hospitable haven we venture to believe that many friends of the Atlantic will remember that ‘Atlantic Books are Pleasant Friends’ and will not treat this new description of them with too peremptory a rudeness.

At about the same time with the appearance of this pamphlet a new list of the educational books issued by the Atlantic Monthly Press will be distributed. The number of these publications has steadily grown until they need a catalogue of their own. The teachers and others who will receive it are probably less addicted to the wastebasket habit than that composite personage, ‘the general reader.’

The Unanimous Reviewers

The Shop-Talker naturally directs an open eye to the notices of new Atlantic books. They are generally comforting to read. At the same time they throw a certain light on the book-reviewer’s mind and methods. His mind appeared to good advantage, for example, when lie began a notice of Miss Montague’s Deep Channel in a New York paper with the words, ‘There is a familiar legend as to the infuriated rabbit that turned and savagely bit the pursuing dogs.’ His methods came into question when this same review, beginning with the same words, appeared a week later, without quotation marks, in a newspaper of the Northwest, and two weeks later, with quotation marks, in a newspaper of the South. Whether the syndicate or the self-help method accounts for this triplication, it is interesting in its suggestion of the wide diffusion of New York opinion, and should cause the critics of that city to take their responsibilities with all seriousness.

It has been interesting also to observe that, quite independently of one another, several critics have found in Deep Channel something which has caused them to liken it to Ethan Frome and Miss Lulu Bett. The fact that Deep Channel is a short novel, extremely well written, is hardly enough of itself to account for this sense of resemblance. Perhaps it is that all three books, intensely local as they are, deal with essential situations of broad significance.

An Autobiographic Bookplate

Without recourse to illustration — of which these pages must remain innocent — how can we describe a bookplate that has recently drifted into the Atlantic shop? Will mere words picture its central design to the reader’s eye? This is a drawing of a bookbinder’s table with some shelves of books above it. Milton, Shakespeare, Epictetus, Cowper, and, most conspicuously of all, Mark Twain, linked in symbol with a plethoric frog, shine out among the titles. At one side of the tools and bookbinding apparatus on the table stands a volume labeled ‘Homer’s Iliad, Pope’; and at the other, ‘The Amenities of Book-Collecting, Newton.’

If you see the picture, you imagine — and truly — how autobiographic it is. The ‘Amenities’ began the story, by causing one of its readers to read also A Magnificent Farce, which made a collector of him. Doctor Johnson followed in due time, but meanwhile the collector, being skillful with his fingers, had taken up bookbinding for the worthier preservation of some of the old books he was buying. Then came the designing of his own bookplate, and the deed was done. The Newton regiment in the army of bibliophiles had won a new recruit.

An Autumn Text

During the months since these columns first made mention of Social Back-grounds of English Literature, the mills of the manufacturing department have been at their grinding, and the book was ready for the fall term. The authors, Mr. Ralph P. Boas and Miss Barbara M. Hahn, both of the Central High School, Springfield, Massachusetts, have been at great pains to make entirely clear the relation of English literature to English life, and to select illustrations which will enable the student to re-create for himself flic atmosphere of each period with which they deal.

Iron in the Blood

Professor Kenneth A. Robinson of the English Department at Dartmouth College is responsible for an interesting list of books which has recently appeared in print. The list is a part of the ‘College after College’ plan which Dartmouth is pursuing through supplying thousands of its alumni with recommendations of books for their reading. It is an extremely catholic list of titles, ranging from Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape to William Lyon Phelps’s Human Nature in the Bible. Biography, poetry, and fiction fill the spaces between, and in one of them it is pleasant to find Mr. Charles Rumford Walker’sSteel: the Diary of a Furnace Worker. If the ‘College after College’ Dartmouth men develop in all the directions suggested by Professor Robinson’s choice of books for them, they will indeed inherit the earth, as, in allegiance to their college, they would probably declare that they should.