BOOKS AND WRITERS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19382, 17 July 1926, Page 7 (Supplement)

BOOKS AND WRITERS.

Books and the printed word are so inseparably connected in the modern mind that it is hard to realise that book-sell-ing was a flourishing trade long before Carton. " The Yespasiano Memoirs," which have lately been translated into Enclrsh, gives us glimpses of the life of a Florentine bookseller in the brave days of the Renaissance when " the Greek classics were pouring in from fallen Byzantium and lost Latin texts were being nnrarthed in Rome and Florence." Copyists were in great demand and Yespasiano got the cream of the business. * * * * e The book-collectors of fhose spacious fvrnes were not niggardly in their commissions. Cosimo do Medici, for instance, being determined " to collect a suitable lot of books" gave Yespasiano carte blanche in the matter. "He was anxious 1 should use all possiWe despatch and after the library was begun* as there was no lack of money, I engaged forty-five scribes and completed two hundred volumes in twenty-two months." The Duke of Urbico, too, had always thirty or forty scribes working for him, but there seems to have been little literary discrimination showed. Homer and Plato were lumped in with the merest scholiasts. A medieval best-seller was Zembino's Ureversal History. The author " took no steps to have it copied, but by my persuasion and encouragement he let iit be done, and it quickly attracted so great, notice that it was sent to all part,s of Italy, to Catalonia, Spain, France, England and Rome." Yespasiano as a master of scriptoria seems to have resented the shadow of the printer's art-. Of the Urbino collection he says, " ail the books are superlatively good and written with the pen, and had there been one printed volume it would have been ashamed in such company."

John Galsworthy has recently been risking the Continent and has found the Viennese especially delighted to honour him. In Hungary, too, he is well known. " Loyalties" has been acted with great success in Budapest and the " Forsyte Saga" has also been translated into Hungarian. At a dinner given for him by the Prague Pen Club he likened the Fraternity of the Pen to Lilliputians who might, slowly and by degrees, succeed in binding the Gulliver of crime and sin-

.A " stunt-merchant" born out of due time was Timothy Dexter, of Newbury - port, Mass., whose incredible story is told by J. P. Marquand and published by Fisher Unwin. He began business life as a leather-dresser but at the end of his apprenticeship possessed only Eight Dolors and 20 seats." Yet he had no doubt that he would be eventually wealthy. His chance came through a gamble in depreciated currency, and he then went to live in a great house in Newburyport, assumed a title, and in general displayed all the ostentation of a determined parvenu. * * * » #

But his eccentricity went further and one development of it might have emanated from the brain of that prince of paradox, G. K. Chesterton. For in defiance of proverbs he sent coals to Newcastle and warming-pans to the West Indies. And the mad ventures prospered. The warming-pans were welcomed as cooking utensils and the coals reached Newcastle at a time when existing labour troubles had temporarily closed the mines, and consequently found ready purchasers. Readers of " The Long Bow" will be struck by the coincidence of wild fancy and sober fact-

Election to any one of the five Academies which make up the Institute de France may be taken, says a writer in a London journal, to assure longevity, for there are no fewer than thirty-two cf these gentlemen who are over eighty years old. The veteran is the Due de Loubat, a member of the Academic des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, who is ninety-five, but there are three more who are over ninety. As for the mere octogenarians they include snch active and vigorous boys as Clemence.au, Branly, the wireless inventor, and Jules Cambon, the president of the Council of Ambassadors.

" I shall be broke again and rich again; but broke or rich, I shall, if the Lord keeps me in good health, be grateful and happy for every new experience, for every novel aspect that the slow-moving circle of life presents to me. I have made many big friends and provoked a few little enmities which will clear up some day. And I am here! Newspaper-boy, cabinboy, soldier, journalist, writer—what next ? Whatever it is, I'll bet it is interesting." Such is the buoyant philosophy of the versatile Edgar Wallace.