THE BLUNDERS OF PUBLISHERS

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 151, 30 June 1928, Page 21

THE BLUNDERS OF PUBLISHERS

GOOD ANTHOLOGIES AND BAD (By"Ajax.") Though I was well pleased with the entertainment that Mr. Thomas Burke provided me last week with his "Book of the Inn;" it was far from what I had in view when I started out. My intention.was to take a handful of recent anthologies, of which his was one, in order; to show the perversity with which publishers or editors occasionally prejudico good work by the neglect of quite elementary precautions. But after mentioning the lack of dates, references, and indexes, .1 became immersed in the excellence of his matter, and before I knew where, I was ,time arid space had both run out. One of the most irritating of ■ minorNmalpractices— the repetition of the title "The Book of tho Inn," 401 times in order to saviKus, when reading any one of the 401 pages, from having to turn back to the title-page to discover, what the book is really about—was Vnot even mentioned—a sufficient testimony that there was a solid set-off to these 401 blemishes! # * *.*..■ :- A day or two later it was very gratifying to find attention called to this point by one of the leading weeklies. I >£ad previously noticed Mr. J. C. Squire dealing with it in the "Observer," and Mr. Edward Shanks in.the "Sat- : urday Review," but in a two-column forecast of "The Season's Books" in 1 its ,Literary Supplement the "NewStatesman" of the 19th May, gives a full quarter, of a column to this point and others. relating to the making of books. "At a time when publishers are becoming aware that printing is ; once again a. living craft in Eng- ' landj"the "New Statesman" notes , with regret that not all of them are \ yet fully awake to the heartening fact. i Indeed, tho articlo proceeds, it is symptomatic that some of the largest houses have so 1 - far shown little sign of responding to the in- ': creasing public demand for books, pleasant to ;,ljpjh eye' and touch. But, within a few years, H'Jis- certain, ho publisher in the country, will ■ be"found outside tho movemont. Priming, as <« matter of fact, is a good long way in advance of the intelligence—if that is the' right ■ ;word—directing tho important ■details of pro"ductlon. Why, for example, should there bo .this practice of pushing tho print to the top, •thus giving no room for tho page heading? '.And why should tUo reader be/forced still to 'endure the stupidity of a single page headline 'repeated throughout the book? The Collected Toems of Kipling ana of G. K. Chesterton afford bad examples of this most irritating fault. And the Life of a leading biologist lately published ha 3 the meaningless word "Jlemoir" on every pago. ■'■•■ ■• • # •■ * . * * The name of tho leading biojogist ■whose Life has been placarded as a "Memoir" on every page for fear it might be mistaken for an epic poem or a sermon is not known to me. Bate- ' son would be my only guess because he is the onjy biologist whose life has re-cently-attracted my attention, but I have not.access to the book. Mr. Cecil Palmer has certainly made a very ugly .-job of the volume that he published i'or Mr; Chesterton last year, with "Collected Poems" staring at you from the ■ top of the left-hand page at every opening and "Gilbert Keith Chesterton" from the top of the other. The "New Statesman" might have ad%ed that, though an alphabetical Index of Titles is given at the end of the ■book, there is no Table of Contents and no Index of first Lines. Worse still there is no vestige of a date—an omission' which is' not only utterly unbusinesslike and ' unpardonable, but might reasonably be made illegal. What would be the value of a birth certificate without a date in it? And why should not it be made a condition of copyright that a book should carry its dated birth certificate on its face? .This-appears to be one of those things that they manage better in America. One constantly sees the date or dates of the copyrighting of an American book on the back of the title, and presumably American publishers would not show themselves more punctilious than our own on this point if they had not some inducement to. accuracy which does hot oxist in Britain. . » • *, * / ■ , We have perhaps no right to be surprised if so swift and erratic a genius as Mr. Chesterton has no time to attend to the headlines of his pages. If he recognises no obligation to _ check a quotation before ho puts it into a book in inverted commas, why should he worry about such a trifle as this? A man who spends half his time standing on his head must be excused from not seeing some perfectly elementary things as plainly as many less clever people. Brit it does surprise me to lind that Mr. Budyard Kipling should have allowed his publishers to disfigure his pages with the "stupidity" of which'the "New Statesman" com-, plains. I have not seen tho last edition of his Collected Poems, but the one that Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton published for him in 1919 has been one of my abominations ever since I had the misfortune to make- its acquaintance. ' "Rudyard Kipling's "Verse." appears at the top of the lefthand page and "Inclusive Edition, 1885-1918" at the top of the other; the largo, black type completely dominates everything else on both pages; and the vulgar shouting, like that of an American front-page headline proclaiming the very latest attraction in murder or divorce, is maintained throughout the three volumes averaging 300 pages each! ..Though Mr. Kipling has the services of', some of the very best publishers in the trade, ho does not seem to have them"sufficiently under control to prevent their playing him even worse tricks than this. . ■ When I hear the present ago denounced on account of its taste for anthologies, I sometimes retort that I have only found a singlo bad one among tho lot and that is "A Kipling Anthology: Verso," which was published in 1922. Though it calls itsolf an anthology, it is really not an anthology at all. An anthology—literally, a collection of flowers—is defined by the Pocket Oxford Dictionary as "a collection of small choice poems," and: though the term is sometimes, extended, to include extracts from long poemSj'that will not save the present collection. In this so-called anthology even the smaller poems have been deliberately and systematically broken up.' It is a collection not of flowers but of fragments of flowers. Never in j all my life have I seen such vandalism, perpetrated in the name of literature. j. , *,' • * « To justify my strong language, let me indicate tho treatment of some of the poems. Hero are the names of .half a dozen of them, not selected for the purposes of a case, but because they were the first of those I knew best to catch my eye. The bracketed number represents in each case tho number of stanzas in the poem, the second is the number quoted in the "anthology": Chant-Pagan (6), 1; Hymn before Action (Gl 1' Ballad of tho Bolivar (12), 1; white Horses (10),. 2; Coastwise (G), 1; Jlandalay (G), 1. . Only in one of the six .cases—"White Horses"—is there anything to indicate that there has been any mutilation. But a'crueller case than any of them, not from the-scale of the maltreatment but jfrbm'thequality of the poem, is that of tho "Recessional." The last three «tanzas of this beautiful hymn are cut Off; the; other two are made to do duty

fov the whole, and again without any warning that they are not the whole! When.a Prize Poem was called for as a part of this city's celebrations of tho South African War the committee reported that the'results were pi or-, that the best of them was far too long, and that it was impossible "to cut a poem in pieces like a bar of soap." The report was well received, and the late Mr. George Fisher much increased tho merriment by blandly asking, "Why not?" • • * * One possible answer wasthat a poem is a work of art, and another that a poet is just as thin-skinned as ariy other artist. On either of these grounds it is impossible to believe that Mr. Kipling can have perpetrated this ghastly botchwork of his poems, or have consented to it with his eyes open. How, then, have his publishers been* able to get it.done? And what were the literary, critics of England doing when they allowed such a hash to be passed off on the public as an "anthology"? ■ We had" a right to expect something better from the firm of which Mr. E. V. Lucas is one of the directors. . If they had given the office-boy the necessary books and a pair of scissors, with instructions to cut 280 snips -averaging 12 lines each and never leaving more than two consecutive stanzas together, lie could hardly have made a worse mess than some presumably adult botcher has been allowed to make. If Mr. Lucas himself had filled 200 Bvo. pages with.a real Kipling Anthology ho would have given us one of the most attractive volumes of modern verse. .» • * * Reverting to tho much smaller subjects of the "New Statesman's" modest complaint, I was doubly pleased by Mr. J. C. Squire's anticipation of it, because I had previously been- blaspheming him for this very offence. Mr. Squire's "The Comic Muse" is an admirable book, but one's admiration is not increased by finding it alternately called "The Comic Muse" on one page and "An Anthology of Humorous Verso" on the next throughout a volume of 300 pages or more. I am glad to accept Mr. Squire's apology now! In the same scries a still greater portent is "A Laurence Binyon Anthology," so styled at the top of every .page, but with a sort of double-dose on the title-page: "A Laurence Binyon AntlTology. By Laurence Binyon." Substantially, however, it seems to be at the opposite pole from that wretched Kipling volume and to gather the cream of Mr. Binyon's work both proso and, verso, and in quite liberal doses, from a number of books which would be beyond the ordinary book-buyer's reach. In another of _ his recent enterprises,, "The Golden Treasury of Modern Lyrics,'' it is surprising to find that Mr. Binyon has allowed his publishers' to run him into the monotonous page-heading of tho Palgrave Anthologies, of which it is a worthy successor, and their far more irritating use of Roman characters for 'the numbering of the poems. What is the sense of referring us to "No. CCLXXXVIII." when for centuries the world has accepted "288" as a less mystifying guide? And what does a firm like Macmillan's mean by continuing the old impedimenta after the reprint of the old "Golden Treasury" in the World's Classics has illustrated the immense advantage both of Arabic figures and of headlines which follow the change of authors from page to page? >