As this column goes to press the fall season is in full swing. Bookshops are taking on extra hands, publishers are reprinting their popular editions, patrons are making out Christmas lists. . . . Rumor has it that Manuel Komroff’s novel, Coronet, is a Book Club selection for January and, in the same breath, that the booksellers may renew their war against such organizations. . . . Best-seller lists from Baker and Taylor’s and Brentano’s show Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms on its way to first place among the fiction, followed by The Methodist Faun, by Ann Parrish, Field of Honor, Donn Byrne’s posthumous novel, and Whiteoaks of Jalna, by Mazo de la Roche. Newcomers to the non-fiction ranking are Katharine Anthony’s Queen Elizabeth, Marriage and Morals, by Bertrand Russell, and Emerson, by Phillips Russell, the American.... So far the season is marked by the publishers’ prodigality, — 5000 titles,mind you (groans), — by an average of moderate ability, but by the emergence of few books of real calibre. But then, it always takes the moon some lime to rise. . . . Thank you (applause).
