LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 6, 6 July 1935, Page 24

LITERARY NOTES

BOOKS AND AUTHORS ,

/Mr. B. G. A. Cannell must be one of the few London bus conductors, to write an> autobiography. It will appear' in the English-autumn under the title of "Monk to with a foreword by the Bishop of London.

A memorial tablet to John Galsworthy has been •' unveiled in the cloisters at New College,1 Oxford,, by Mr. John Masefield. Galsworthy went there from- Harrow. Mrs. Galsworthy has endowed a scholarship for the study of English literature in memory of her husband.

Harrap and Co. announce that they will make an outright payment of £300 for the best original modern story for boys of the age of about 12 years. The stories should be about 80,000 words in length, and must be submitted to the publishers before October 1, 1935. .

In addition to the phonograph disc of Florence Nightingale's voice, Mr. Howard Flynn, managing director of the Gramophone Record Co., has also found a set of cylinders with some of Tennyson's poems, including "The Charge of the Light Brigade" declaimed by the poet himself. He intends to make gramophone discs of these also.

Messrs. Jonathan Cape announces unabridged editions of Colonel Lawrence's great book, "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom." Hitherto this work has appeared in a very limited edition, printed for private circulation only. The new edition will be1 of 600 pages, with 60 illustrations. The price in England will be 455. There is to be a special limited edition of 750 copies on rag paper; it will have four coloured plates, quarter leather. The price of this will be about £7 17s 6d.

Writers and photographers visiting Italy are offered £530 in prize money for articles about Italy and pictures taken there which are published in other countries by the end of Hhe year. The prizes for articles between 1500 and 5000 words in length are £180, £90, £54, and £36; and for a series of ten published photographs £90, £54, and £27. A payment of £180 for a 1500-word article works out at 2s 4d a word, or much more than has been paid in the past to Kipling, Wells, and George Bernard Shaw.

A committee consisting of the Bishop of Gloucester, the Bishop of Oxford, Sir Frederic Kenyoh, the Dean of ChristY: Church, the Rev. Dr. A. Nairne, Dr.' Alexander Souter,- Dr. F. C. Birkitt, Dr. B. H. Streeter, an& the Rev. S. C. E. Legg has been meeting to consider the possibility of an entirely new text'of the New Testament in Greek, in which full use shall be made of the various readings and interpretations which have been produced by scholarship in recent years. The first result'of their labours, "The Gospel of St. Mark," is being published by the Oxford Press at a guinea. I

It is just a hunderd years since the first of Hans Andersen's fairy tales were given to a completely indifferent world. He had to wait several years for recognition, and even then, as a "Times" writer reminds us, ,jwas criticised "because his tales pointed no moral." ' The surprising thing is that Andersen had no particular love for children, and did not care much for his fairy tales. He resented a sculptor's design representing him as the centre of a group of listening children, and hoped to the end of his days to be remembered as the author of his tedious novel, "The Two Baronesses."

I wonder if Sir James Matthew Barrie, 0.M., whose 75th birthday (on May 9) found him putting a final polish on a new play for Miss Elizabeth Bergner, will ever give us his recipe for successful playwriting? (writes a contributor to the London "Sunday Times"). Years ago he gave away the secret of his method in other branches of literature in response to an editorial request to "tell our readers how you write." It was scribbled on a crumbled sheet of tobacco wrapping, and ran as follows: — Journalism. Fiction. 2 pipes=l hour. 2 pipes=l ounce. x 2 hours—l idea. 7 ounccs=l week. 1 idea=3 pars. 2 weeks=l chapter. 3 ideas=l leader !0 chapters=l nib. 2 nibs=l novel.