TRANSITORY TRASH

Evening Post, Volume CXVII, Issue 47, 24 February 1934, Page 19

TRANSITORY TRASH

'The English law 'which ordains that a. copy of. every publicly printed word shall be sent to- the British : Museum, the Bodleian Library and five other national University libraries, has long been, and is likely to be, a thorn in. the flesh of the custodians of those institutions. The matter was so cogently stated in. a recent article in "The Times" that reproduction is .worth while:—

- "An inherited reverence for books as such, dating from the time.when a book might, be set in the shield of a. university as an object as rare • and precious as the 'golden crowns that Surround it, has yet to.be adapted to the circumstance* of an age that manufactures books as quickly and as mechanically as margarine. It was conceived in days when each copy of each volume was the fruit of long months of cloistered labour by a writer who must be at once a scholar, an artist, and a devotee. It persists when vanloads of mixed and transitory trash are shovelled weekly into the vaults of the British Museum, there to 'remain. . . . unread and unreadable, but doomed by law to be preserved till the ultimate evanescence of wood-pulp shall free posterity from the incubus."

'. An author has received the prize rejection slip of his writing career from a firm of Chinese publishers.

"We read-your manuscripts with boundless delight," wrote the Chinese firm. "By the sacred ashes of our ancestors we swear that we have never dipped into a book of such overwhelming mastery. 'If we were to publish this book it would be impossible in the future to issue any book of a lower standard. As it is unthinkable that within the next 10,000 years we shall find, its equal, we are, to our great regret, compelled to return this too divine work, and beg you a thousand times to forgive our action."