BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

Otago Witness, Issue 3854, 24 January 1928, Page 74

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

Princess Juliana, heiress to the throne of the Netherlands, has written, at the age of 19, a play based on the old fairvstory of “ Bluebeard,” who is represented as a psycho-analyst!

New Nurse: “Johnny! You mustn’t use that dreadful word! “ Precocious Child: “Well, Shaw Masefield use it»*

New Nurse: “Then you mustn’t play with the naughty boys.”—The Humorist,

London, like life, is an inexhaustible treasure house, and another book on the city, “ This London,” describing the “ taverns, haunts, and memories, has been written by Mr Thurston Hopkins.

Mr R. L. Megroz has been interesting himself in many themes, including the poetry of Francis Thompson and the story of Ruth. His latest study has been Shakespeare as a letter and prose writer, and a book on the subject is to be published.

A promising series of plays by Continental authors is announced. A notable item is “ The Kingdom of God,” by G. Martinez Sierra, the Spanish dramatist. It has been translated by Helen and Harley Granville-Barker, and is the ver. sion used at a recent production at the Strand Theatre.

Having dealt with Napoleon and Bismarck, Dr Emil Ludwig turned his attention to some of the great European figures in art, letters, and war, and amongst these are Shakespeare, Byron, and Nelson. The biographical essays will be published with the title “ Genius and Character.”

At a dinner at which Mr Ramsay MacDonald was entertained by the London Scots Labour Club, at the National Hotel, Bloomsbury, the chairman (Mr J. R. Leslie) said that Mr MacDonald had never written poetry. “Mr Leslie has done me an injustice,” said Mr MacDonald, in responding to the toast. “If you knew where to look in some magazines you would see under a name, which I will not divulge, two different varieties of literary outburst that would absolutely amaze you. That is my secret, and I am not going to venture to give you any further information.”

The New York Bookman for November gives the following works of fiction as being most in demand in the public libraries of the United States:— 1. Elmer Gantry Sinclair Lewis 2. Lost Ecstasy Mary Roberts Rine- „ . . . ’ hart o. An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser 4. Twilight Sleep Edith Wharton 5. A Good Woman Louis Bromfield Sorrell and Son Warwick Deeping 7. Doomsday Warwick Deeping 8. God and the : Groceryman Harold Bell Wright 9. The Old Countess Anne Douglas Sedgwick 10. Barberry Bush Kathleen Norris 11. The Immortal Gertrude Atherton Marriage 12. The Sea Gull Kathleen Norris * * * Sussex, Wessex, Dartmoor, and, more recently, Derbyshire, have all been enshrined in the pages of literature. The Lake District, notwithstanding the memory of Wordsworth, has been neglected. However, a novel on that beautiful country called “ The Book of Sanchia Stapleton,” by Miss Una Silberrad, is shortly to be published.

A number of novels yliich are really reconstructions of the life of famous people have appeared recently. There was “ Ariel,” by Andre Maurois, and “ Mrs Socrates,” but perhaps the most famous in this genre was “ The Private Life of Helen of Troy,” by Mr John Erskine, Professor of English Literature in the University of Columbia. He has now written the story of Adam and Eve, which is being published by Mr Eveleigh Nash.

Boris Godunov, of operatic and historical fame; figures in “A Prince of Outlaws,” by Count Alexis Tolstoy, a romance which tells of the days of Ivan the Terrible, and which has just been published by Knopf. The hero of the novel, Prince Serebryany, is captured twice, and on one occasion escapes with the help of Godunov. The author of this novel, which has been highly praised, is a second cousin of the great Leo Tolstoy, and was born in St. Petersburg in 1817. As a boy he sat at the knee of Goethe, and has written three dramas: “ Ivan the Terrible,” “ Tsar Feodor,” and “ Boris Godunov.” He was also the author of the libretto of the opera, “ Boris Cjpdunov.”

Mr John Galsworthy, in “ The Book Window,” gives to an interviewer his list of the 12 greatest works of fiction in the world. The opinion was prompted by Arnold Bennett’s dictum that the 12 greatest novels were written by Russians. With this Mr Galsworthy would not agree, great lover as he is of the Russians. This is his list :— Cervantes: “ Don Quixote.” Tolstoi: “War and Peace.” " Anna Karenina.” Dostoievsky : “ Brothers Karamazov.” Turgenev: “Fathers and Children.” “ Smoke.” Dickens: “ Pickwick Papers.” “ David Copperfield.” Dumas: “Three Musketeers ’ series. or the “ Seine Margot ” series. Mark Twain: “Tom Sawyer.” “ Huckleberry Finn.” Thackeray: “Vanity Fair.” * * * Mr Henry Ette, whose whaling and hunting articles are well known to Otago Witness readers, is this year publishing four booklets: “ Death at 80deg North Latitude,” “ A Real Robinson Crusoe Experience,” “ The Golden Eleeca of the Argonauts,” “ How We Robbed 10,000 Furs in Five Months,” and “ The Oil Kings of the Sea.” in which the whaler relates his curious and stirring

tales of adventures. Spitsbergen is now a Norwegian colony with a coal output of 500,000 tons a year, but for 25 years back Mr Ette and his comrades were the only men who passed the Polar night on the land. Dickensiang the world over will remember this week (says the London Sunday Times of October 22) the eighty-eighth birthday of the great novelist’s only surviving daughter, who first saw the light in Doughty street, and was christened Kate Macready Dickens, after the great actor who became her godfather. In her the family genius turned to art, and, after studying in London and Paris—one of her teachers being Frederick Walker-— she gained considerable' distinction as a painter of children, many of her works being hung in the Royal Academy. She married, first, in 1860. J. Alston Collins, a brother of Wilkie Collins, th e novelist, who died in 1873, and, later, Charles Perugini, a fellow-artist. Mrs Perugini lives in retirement in Kensington, not- far from her only surviving brother, Sir Henry Fielding Dickens.

A memorial panel in the porch of the village hall at- Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury (England), erected by friends and admirers throughout the world as a tribute to Joseph Conrad, was unveiled in October by Mr R. B. Cunningh ame Graham. Among the subscribers to the memorial were Lord Balfour, Mr Thomas Hardy, Mr Bernard Shaw Mr Rudyard Kipling, Mr John Galsworthy, Mr Stanley Weyman, Mr Arnold Bennett, and Mr Hugh Walpole. Canon AshtonGwatkm said that, as Conrad helped them substantially with the erection of the village hall, it was felt that the most suitable memorial to his memory was an open-air toggia, with seats at th e entrance to the hall, where the villagers could sit and talk and smoke, and the wayfaring man could hnd a rest—a kind of informal village centre such as might have provided the opening chapter to on e o f Conrad’s own stories. Mr H. R. Dent, Conrad’s pubhsher, had subscribed £5O for the medallion portrait of Conrad.