LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 98, 27 April 1935, Page 24

LITERARY NOTES

BOOKS AND AUTHORS

An autographed copy of Rupert Brooke's "Poems" (1911). fetched £53 at a recent London sale. The man who translated Shakespeare into Japanese, Mr. ,'Shoyo Tsubouchi, died recently, aged 77. Mile. Ella K. Maillart, .'the young Swiss author of "Turkestan Solo," recently met during a visit to China, Mr. Peter Fleming, who also writes amusing accounts of his travels. "Anthony Adverse," Mr. Hervey Allen's novel, which has sold' more than 500,000 copies in the English-speaking world, has now been banned in the Irish Free State. , M. Jean Bommart, whose play, "Man of Yesterday," was produced in London recently, is novelist as well as dramatist. His adventure story, "Le Poisson Chinois," has just been translated into English under the title of "The Chinese Fish." ; - . . Full use of the recent,discoveries in the .Pepysian Library at. Magdalene College will be made by Mr. Arthur Bryant,;.in the second volume of his "Life .of Pepys." This volume, entitled "Samuel Pepys: the Saviour of the,'; Navy," will be published by the Cambridge University Press in the English autumn. It , is based on a mass of Pepysian material, of which the two recently-discovered Magda-lene-journals (written in,, longhand) form a, small,part: One of the journals deals with the period of the Popish* Plot (1679)' and the other with Charles ll'arid his. Privy Council's investigations into Navy Office affairs. ' The tyranny of quantity is the greatest menace today to our intellectual liberty, said Sir Josiah Stamp, a director of the Bank of England, in addressing the guests' at a literary luncheon in London recently. ] Many books of superior calibre were smothered beneath piles of less worthy volumes. Birth control in the lowest ranks of bookland would raise the standard of life and give better books a chance of survival. The most prevalent tyranny of books.lay in the unbalanced propor-tion-of reading to reflection/ The craving for the printed page was not unlike the drug habit or chain smoking. Gazjng; out, 6f a window or conversation seemed to' suggest idleness, whereas ■preoccupation in books earned a totally undeserved ■ superior status. With incessant' reading . ana rare thinking the.spring of the mind was constantly depressed, and must ultimately lose its, ire'silierice, , \