IN BOOKLAND

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 12 May 1928, Page 18

IN BOOKLAND

“Roxanne,” the new novel by H. de Vere Staepoole, is due in the Dominion next month. ***** Bveleigh Nash is. publishing “My Life in the Foreign Legion/.’ by 1 rmee A age of Denmark. * “The Coming of Christ” is a new play, bv John Masefield, to be published by Heinemann. W. B. Maxwell’s new book, “We Forget Because We Must,” is to be published shortly by Hutchinsons. *****

Lloyd Osbourne, Stevenson’s stepson and collaborator, has written a novel for Heinemann called “The Grierson Mystery.” * * * *

Mr. Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett’s account of the Dardanelles campaign, published bv Hutchinsons, is said to contain much that did not get into the newspapers- at the time and has not got into the histories up till now. * * * * *

Critical studies of the old by the young are the order of the day, the latest being entitled “Scrutinies _ (Wishart). Galsworthy, Wells, and Bennett are among; those scrutinised, the “scrutineers” including D. H. Lawrence, John Holms, and Edwin Muir. *****

Captain Elliott White Springs, the American author of.the war-time diaiy of an aviator, owns and goes about everywhere in his private airplane.

John Buchan thinks that as a ‘ liteiary language” the Lowland Scots is on the upgrade again. He pronounces it easy to master if one is egged on to do so by one’s interest?™ a writer wno uses it.

A second-hand bookseller in Charing Cross Road has installed a butcher s scale outside his door and is selling his I oast valuable books by weight at 2d a lb.

A collection of unjublished poems and letters of Macaulay’s has been presented to Trinity College, Cambridge One of the poems, “Boswortli Field. ’ is similar in metrical form to “Ivry” and the “Armada.”

At the Antiquarian Booksellers’ dinner in London, Sir Michael Sadler said he had heard a great- many people speak with grief about the departure of precious books .and pictures from Great Britain to America, but bo noticed that nearly always they were people who tegarde'd it as an extravagance themselves to spend money o" books.

Once in every thirty years the Ghetto in Prague is haunted by an evil spirit called the Golem. The story of one such haunting, and of the terrible tilings that happened to haunter and haunted, is told in a novel called “The Golem,” by Gustav Meyrinck, of which nearly a quarter of a million copies have been sold in Germany. A translation of “The Golem,” which is said in the original to touch the heights of horror attained by Hoffmann and Poe. is to be pub Used in England this spring by Victor Gollanez.

William Albery’s “Parliamentary history of Horsham, 1295-1885” (Longmans) is commended by Leonard Wooll as throwing more light? upon the lustory of politics and political institutions in England than most of the standard authorities. It also gives a vision ol communal and individual life rooted in a Sussex town and stretching over six centuries without a break in memory or tradition.

In a- review of Mr. Wells’s latest work, “The Way the World is Going, ’ in the “Times Literary Supplement,’ it is remarked that the volume represents a campaign in popular journalism. The articles it contains were written for great Sunday newspapers in England and America, and in his preface Mr. Wells make jocular allusion to editorial liberties which occasionally distorted the character of his articles. “Now that we have his text- unmutilated and unadorned, we feel,” declares the reviewer, “that the editors would have done much better to let it alone. No journalist could write with more breadth, .simplicity, and vivacity; and if Mr. Wells as a. journalist has faults, they are the kind of faults that the popular newspaper is -apt as a rule to foster rather than suppress.”

Two years before his death in 1827 Archibald Constable, the great Edinburgh publisher, conceived the idea of issuing <x cheap series o-f books with the designation “Constable’s Miscellany.”

Constable, London, inaugurating a new series so entitled, “will strive to follow in the way of Constable, Edinburgh.” This they promise in their announcement of the first four volumes —“The Jews,” by Hilaire Belloc; “The Garden Party,” ‘by Katherine Mansfield; “What Is and What Might Be,” by Edmund Holmes; and “Spiritual Adventures,” by Arthur Symons.

Commenting on the lament of Lord Goiell at the Authors’ Club recently, that the novelist has driven the poet out of the field in modern literature, “Alpha of the Plough” in the London “Star” says it is .a fact which admits of no controversy - There has never been so much reading done in the history of the world as is being done today; but it is equally true that there was never .less poetry read. For the bulk of us “reading” means novel read ing, and it is probable that for one person that has read “Paradise Lost” there could be found ten thousand who have read every novel of Edgar Wallace, and for one who has read Shakespeare s Sonnets there are at least a thousand who have devoured “The Way of an Eagle.”

The Bible continues to be the world’s best seller. The Government of Mexico has published tbo Testament as a State document, which it has freely distributed among the citizens of that country. The Gideons, a familiar name for the Christian Commercial Travellers’ Association, has placed nearly 900,000 Bibles in hotel rooms in the United States. The New York Bible Society reports that, it, too, has placed a large mnnbpr of Bibles in hotel rooms to give the traveller absent from home, if be is so inclined, a chance to read the sacred Scriptures. It comes as a shock of surprise to learn that there is an organised movement against it. It is reported that the “American Anti-Bible Society,” in its efforts to destroy confidence in the sacred. Scriptures, has begun a deliberate campaign to remove the Bible from hotel rooms and other public place.*. A large -sum has been raised for the purpose of carrying on this campaign, anil already literature adverse to the Bible is being sent to every hotel proprietor and to commercial travellers.