BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

Otago Witness, Issue 3860, 6 March 1928, Page 75

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

• ?* 6^e y Farson, the American novelist and traveller, is off on a tramp through Spain, from the Pyrenees to Gibraltar. He is in search of local colour for a new novel and is following in the footsteps of George Borrow. °

Mr Thomas Wright, secretary of the Cowper Museum, Olney, is collecting subscriptions for a fund to purchase for the Museum a collection of more than a hundred letters by the poet and several manuscripts.

Messrs. Alfred A. Knopf have moved into new premises in Bedford Square. The house was once occupied by Lord Eldon, and latterly was the hom e of the late Earl of Oxford and Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson.

The author of that successful tale of Highland adventure, “ The Key Above the Door,” is not a Scotsman, but an Irishman, who spent several years in Government service in the north of Scotland. Mr Walsh wrote his book in Dublin during the height of the troubles.

According to her husband. Anita Loos has decided to give up writing after the publication of “ But They Marry Brunettes,” her sequel to “ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Out of these two books she will have made enough money on which to live comfortably for the rest of her life.

. The First Edition Club is going to publish, in a limited edition, the Ravenna Journal kept by Lord Byron from May 1, 1821, to May 18, 1822. In this journal Byron put down his ideas on a great variety of subjects, from duelling and oratory to the poets and politicians of his time. It has never before been separately printed, and hitherto has only been known in the complete edition of the poems and letters prepared by Lord Ernie, who has written a new introduction for the journal in its First Edition Club format.

Miss Clemence Dane promises to outdo all the modern saga writers in the length of time covered bv her new novel, " The Babyons,” a Family Chronicle, which is to be published early this year. -This is no mere chronicle of three generations. It begins in 1750 and comes down to 1906; and m nearly four hundred pages tells the story of five generations of this curiously named family. As may be gathered, it should please the library subscriber w’-ose demand is always for “ a nice long book.”

Mrs Oliver Strachey (Ray Strachey) is now preparing for publication the remarkable diary left to her by her grandmother, Hannah Whately Smith, on which sh e has based her striking novel. “ Shaken by the Wind.” Hannah Smith was a noted Quaker preacher who, seceding from that body, joined - successively several of the curious sects which flourished in the States in her time ; and in the diaries she left a full and detailed record of the’scandals and extraordinary practices she discovered, which eventually , made her return, disillusioned, to her original faith.

In the “ Cornish Miner,” a new book by Mr A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, we read:

According to one story, the brasswork of Solomon’s Temple was made from Cornish tin, whilst in another St. Paul himself is said to have preached to Cornish miners, and to have actually brought tin from Creybourne Mine, near St. Day. Yet another tradition states that tln-smeltlng was only first discovered by St. Piran, the Cornish miner's patron saint, which reduces the industry to the status of a painfully modern affair; whilst the belief, on the other hand, that Joseph of Arimathea was a tinworker redounds to the credit of the industry.

As “ grand chieftain of the .pudding race,” the haggis played an important part on the evening of January 25 in the celebration by members of the Royal Caledonian Society of Melbourne of the anniversary of the birthday of Robert Burns, who was born near Ayr on January 25, 1759. Amid laughter and cheering, the strange concoction was borne aloft in procession round the tables in the Town Hall supper-room to the skirl of pipes and gravely deposited before the president (Mr D. Buchanan), who declared it well and truly opened for further dissection ayd distribution. Caledonians and Sassenachs then ceremoniously “ toasted ” each other in spoonfuls of the steaming mince.

The Strand Magazine asked a number of leading authors this question:—Of the great characters of fiction, which would you most like to have created? Some of the replies are as follow:—

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Colonel Newcome; Mr H. G. Wells, Falstaff; Mr John Masefield, Homer’s Achilles; Mr H. de Vere Stacpoole, D’Artagnan; Mr W. B. Maxwell John Inglesant; Mr E. F. Benson, Gus in Henry Kingsley’s " Ravenshoe ’’ ; “ lan Hay,” old Vance in William de Morgan’s “ Joseph Vance ”; Mr Temple Thurston, Sir Willoughby Patterne in “ The Egoist ”; Mr Hugh Walpole, Don Quixote; Mr Gilbert Frankau, Don Juan, “ as Byron saw him ” ; Mr Thomas Burke, Mr Collins of “ Pride and Prejudice ”; Mr Pett Ridge, Mrs Hat in Patricia Hamilton’s “ Craven House ” ; Miss Marjorie Bowen, Lovelace in “ Clarissa Harlowe ”; Mr Denis Mackail, Catriona in Stevenson’s novel; Mr Horace A. Vachell, Robinson Crusoe; Mr W. J. Locke, D’Artagnan ; Mr Compton Mackenzie, Don Quixote, with Antigone as Sophocles gave her to us ; Mr Cosmo Ham'lton, Becky Sharpe. It is noteworthy that none of the authors approached selected a Dickens character, though Mr Compton Mackenzie gave “Mr Pickwick and Falstaff ” as his “ next choices.”

E. S. (Melbourne) writes as follows to the Australasian:—Your review of the “ Life and Letters of Joseph Conrad,” by M. Jean Aubry brings out the fact that Conrad found the labour of literary composition painfully difficult. Yet Conrad kept notebooks, which he used to assist his memory and spur his imagination; though I see that M. Jean Aubry does not mention any of these documents. I was in London in 1925, and met there Mr Richard Curie, who was Conrad’s literary executor—he is the “ dearest Dick ” of several of the letters in the recently published book. Mr Curie pulled out of his pocket and showed, to me two small cloth-cove: ed notebooks, such as one could buy at any stationer’s shop for fid each. He said, “ You had better have a look at these now, as there will not be another opportunity of showing them to you. They are going to America to-morrow. I have to-day sold them, on behalf of Conrad’s widow, for lOOgns each to an American collector.” It was difficult to examine them carefully at the moment, because we were dining with a party of literary friends, who were all talking about interesting things, and one could not give proper attention to them. But it was easy to see that they were books in which Conrad had scrawled, in hurryscurry fashion, notes of colour in a landscape, a few words sketching the appearance of a queer character, scraps of dialogue, ideas for stories, odd thoughts, anything that came into his head or under his eye. Mr Curie did not tell me the name of the purchaser, but that there are collectors who are prepared to pay high prices for Conradiana is further apparent from a paragraph in the current issue of The Times Weekly, which mentions that 22 autograph presentation copies of Conrad first editions—originally published at Cs . a volume—fetched £630 at auction.