LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 29, 4 February 1939, Page 27

LITERARY NOTES

BOOKS AND AUTHORS

A cheaper, issue of Herr Hitler's "Mem Kampf'has rushed to a sale of 70,000 copies.

To Sir John Squirei^he passion for new; poets, at the momfehtj seetris very much like the wornfen's.;:psiSsion for new hats; ugly, ridiculous* second-rate, mutative, it does not matter so long as it is new.

A new prize of 20,00^fp-aags for the, best bool^ o3E adventures has been instituted in- Piris under the ■will of the late explorer Jean Charcot. The prize will be awarded by a mixed committee of authors and juvenile readers.

The jubilee edition of the collected works of Leo Tolstoy, consisting of eight-nine volumes,., including his thirteen diaries to be issued for the first time and about 10,000 letters,, will be ready early this year.

Lord Elton has written a life of his friend Ramsay Mac Donald, the first volume of which,/tracing Mac Donald's extraordinarily' varied career up to the end of the war, will be published shortly by Collins. But the author makes it clear in a foreword that what he has written is not an "official" biography, adding that he hopes the "official" life of Mac Donald will be done one day by his son, Mr. Malcolm Mac Donald, the present Secretary for the Dominions and Colonies. Of his own book, Lord Elton says that it is "an attempt to recpunt7 and - interpret a career i which has perhaps been more thoroughly misunderstood than-any in our recent political .history." ,

Speaking when he opened a new branch of a library at Ledbury, his native town, the' Poet Laureate, Mr. John Masefield, told how for years he used to read in the great library of the British Museum, and how he had the privilege of sitting next to Lenin, who started the Russian revolution, a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, and a Bishop of the Church of' England. "I think that myself, sitting between them, kept them from theological disputes." Mr. Masefield also spoke reminiscently of the time when, as he said, he was fifth librarian in a training ship. In this training ship his task was to go ashore and bring in the mails, and then he had the job }of sitting on board to see that no one {bathed from the' library windows.

Sweden commemorated recently the eightieth birthday of Dr. Selma Lagerlof, the Swedish novelist and. a distinguished member of the Swedish Academy, who was the first woman to be honoured with the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1909). No other Swedish writer has been translated into so many languages, and no Swedish author has had such world-wide appeal as Dr. Lagerlof, who was made a Doctor .of Philosophy at Uppsala in 1907. Her works have been translated into 39 languages, a record only surpassed by Emanuel Swedenborg and by August Strindberg. Dr. Lagerlof spent her eightieth birthday quietly. She has been in failing health for some time, and her ' doctors advise her to exercise the utmost care.