LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 88, 15 April 1939, Page 20

LITERARY NOTES

BOOKS AND AUTHORS

Talking books for the use of blind people in Italy, Germany, France, and Spain have been produced in London by the National Institute for the Blind.

V Hutchinson's have.just issued at the modest price of 6d an extremely readable and informative chronicle of the year- 1938. It. is written by Mr. C. Lewis Broad, and is called "The Year in Story and Picture." The book is illustrated with 116 photographs.

Mr. Harold Nicolson, M.P., has contributed a volume on "Diplomacy" to "The Home University Library." The book, announced by Thornton Butterwdrth, gives a summary of the history and development of diplomacy from the earliest times to the present day, and describes the new types of European diplomacy as practised by Russia and by the totalitarian States.

A fine copy of Cicero's "De Senectute," from the press of William Caxton (1481), fetched £1080 at the London sale of the library of Mortimer Schiff, the New York banker. One of the four perfect copies known of Thomas Betson's "A Ryght Profytable Treatyse," printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1500, went for £135, and a 1653 copy of Thomas a Kempis's "De Imitatione Christi" for £145.

Michael Joseph's spring list is headed by Mr. H. G, Wells's new novel "The Holy Terror," which the publisher claims is the most important novel Mr, Wells has written for many years. -It-is a long book (about 150,000 words) which deals with the,life and death of a world dictator. Beginning in the nineteen twenties, the story, advances to the present time^ and .a future of characteristic Wellsiarfc invention and imagination.

Two years ago the- Library Association decided to award annually a medal for the best children's book published each year. The book is chosen-by the vote of children's librarians in Great Britain, and for 1938 the award goes to "The Circus is Coming," by Noel Streatfield, which is published by Dent. Miss Streatfield, already well known as a novelist, has written two other children's books, "Ballet Shoes" and "Tennis Shoes," which have been immensely popular.

The American novelist. Neil Swanson- has signed a contract with his publishers for a series of 25 historical novels, the entire series to form an American saga dealing particularly with the advance of the American frontier from the middle border in Pennsylvania and Maryland across the Ohio country to the Mississippi. | The first book will be called "The ; Temporary: Gentleman." The "New 'York Times'* supposes that this is probably the longesMerm contract ever Entered into between a publisher and ran- author.

According to an Australian friend who spent some time with the Priestle.ys in England recently, J. B. Priestley may come out here in the not so far distant future, says the "Australasian." He has been travelling widely of late years—"The Doomsday Men" and others of his recent novels reflect sojourns in America—and he is keenly interested in Australia and anxious to see this country. The idea in ;his mind to bring a -company out to produce some of his' plays would mean- his daughters accompanying him, for they are members of those "good companions" who tread the jboards in his company of players in England.

Herr Stefan Zweig, the Austrian Jewish writer, a number of whose books—including "The Case of Sergeant Grischa" and "Action Before Verdun" —have been translated into English, finds London the ideal city for authors. It has, he says, the best libraries, it is becoming the world's music capital, and it has no tense political atmosphere to disturb or distress the artist. He has had plenty of opportunity for making that discovery, for the position of the Jew in Europe has led to his spending most of his time for the last four or five years in England. And he has now applied for British citizenship.