IF you wish to observe what the depression has done to bookmaking, consider first the retail price of those two behemoth volumes, Anthony Adverse by Hervey Allen, and Experiment in Autobiography by H. G. Wells, the one $3.00, the other $4.00. In flush times they would probably have been published in two volumes at $.5.00 and $10.00 the set, respectively — and a public used to $15.00 theatre seats would have paid the price! Consider likewise the decline in the Limited Editions racket. No longer are we invited to buy for twenty iron men one of the three hundred signed copies of Thundering Mudpuddles by Ali Baba, with (incomprehensible) illustrations by Jesse James. . . . To those interested in the survival of the essay it must, be gratifying to see Alexander Woollcott’s witty and well-seasoned collection. While Rome Burns, lead the national best-seller list month after month. Incidentally, Mr. Woollcott decided to reduce his weight last summer. His publishers bet him that he could n’t take off a pound for every thousand copies his book sold. During the hot months it looked as if the author would win, but when in the autumn the sale passed the fifty-second thousand, the Viking editors paid up. They did n’t want Woollcott to dwindle himself too seriously. . . . The handsomest reprint of this present season is. I believe. Random House’s four-volume set of Marcel Proust. The novels are complete, in the authorized translation, and display a type page and binding mighty pleasing to the eye. The boxed set costs $12.50. One of the most inexpensive reprints and certainly a book worth discovering is the Oxford University Press edition of Father and Son. by Sir Edmund Gosse. Eighty cents, please.
Three first-class sea stories have just anchored in the Atlantic’s harbor: Pitcairn’s Island, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall (which required a first printing of 25.000 copies); Captain Caution, by Kenneth Roberts, a novel of the War of 1812 which will certainly be prized by those who enjoyed the action and Yankee humor of Rabble in Arms; and thirdly, The Taking of the Cry, by John Masefield (Macmillan, $1.75). ‘Whenever Masefield touches the sea,’ writes Henry W. Nevinson, ‘I feel in myself a certain rise of temperature and a quickening of blood.’ So do we all: I doubt if it would be possible to read such a book as Bird of Dawning placidly. In his new story the Poet Laureate returns to the Eastern Spanish Main, which, in point of fact, he once knew as a sailor serving before the mast. His book begins with the rumblings of a modern revolution in the tiny state of Santa Ana: the uprising depends on the Navy, and the Navy for its survival depends on the extrication of a gun transport which was betrayed to the enemy and laid up in a sealed harbor. But Drake once found his way into that barricaded harbor, and his reincarnation — an English pilot of to-day— finds a way out. The full measure of The Taking of the Gry will best be enjoyed by those of some nautical experience, but even a half measure of Masefield is good fun for the landlubber.
If I am any judge, work on a newspaper is the most glamorous beginning for young men of our time; it has the attraction which entering the church or going to sea once held for our great-grandfathers. A publisher finds a good many applicants knocking at his door, but it usually develops that they have tried the dailies first. In the future I will urge them to read and inwardly digest City Editor, by Stanley Walker (Stokes, $3.00). Air. Walker is the city editor of the New York Herald Tribune, he manifestly loves his job, and we know he does it superlatively well. W hen he writes about Newspaper Row and its activity, he has much less of that hard-boiled utterance, much less of that suspiciously cynical attitude, which are commonly attributed to journalists. In a random, anecdotal fashion he covers phase after phase of a reporter’s career, naming the big shots, their successes and failures, their salaries and methods, their fights, their scoops, and their personal contributions to American newsprint. It makes for masculine and absorbing reading and it tells a great deal.
