BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

Otago Witness, Issue 3882, 7 August 1928, Page 72

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

The first issue of Joseph Conrad’s novel, “ Chance,” should have on the reverse side of the title page the words “ First published in 1913,” and it should also contain publisher’s advertisements dated July, 1913. Only about 50 copies of this issue were printed owing to a dispute in the printing trade. Hence this accident makes the book rare.

The oldest firm of publishers in the world is Longmans, Green, and Company. Since 1724 they have been carrying on business on the same site in Paternoster row, London, but the business was in existence even before that. It belonged to William Taylor, who published the

first authentic edition of “ Robinson Crusoe” in 1719. More than that, Messrs Longmans are also the successors of Rivington’s, who commenced business in Waterloo place in 1711.

Oxford, for the second time in its history, has conferred the annual poetry award known as Newdigate Prize upon a woman. The winner is Miss Angla M. F. Cave, who thus succeeds the onlyother woman winner, Miss Gertrude E. Erevelyan, who was successful last year. Both are from Lady Margaret’s Half, one of the leading women’s colleges in Oxford. The Newdigate Prize was founded in 1806 by the antiquary Sir Roger Newdigate. Among previous holders have been Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and John Buchan. About the year 1810 Miss Rachel Burton, daughter of Dr James Burton, competed and re-, ceived top marks for the prize, but was disqualified because she was a woman.

Mr Michael Sadlier, the well-known publisher and novelist, addressed the members of the Leeds Women’s Luncheon Club, and boldly put forward the contention that the-extreme scarcity of the female book collector was an interesting phenomenon, which indicated an essential difference between the sexes. He thinks that, much of the distaste of women for the pursuit of book-collecting is due to their dislike for the grime of the second-hand booksellers’ shop, and of those unexplored basements which to him are Aladdin’s caves for richness. He is also of the opinion that desire for mental contact, plus pride in possession, and as a second stage that conception of bookcraft as a science, stand at the parting of the ways between the masculine and feminine mentalities.

Mr Harlan Hatcher writes to thy London Sundav Times:—

We believe, even after reading Philin Guedalla’s “ The Passing of the Novel," th»c * the corpse is rather animated. ... It comforting to recall that other alert ages were swamped with much writing. There is that brave epistle which good Thomas Coryat wrote to his readers (1611) : “ Having lately considered in my serious meditations (candid Reader) the unmeasurable abundance of books on all Artes, sciences, and arguments whatsoever that are printed in this learned age wherein we now breathe, in so much that methinks we want rather readers for bookes that bookes for readers; my thoughts beganne to be much distracted ” Having so considered, like a good modern critic, he gave this learned age another book.

Poetry House, a meeting place fo? poets and lovers of poetry, has just been formally opened in New York at n meeting attended by representatives of both business and” literature. Miss Barbara Young, one of the founders of Poetry House and author of “ The Keys of Heaven,” presided. Miss Young said she asked Lord Bryce, when he came as Ambassador from Great Britain to America more than 20 years ago, what he considered America’s greatest need, “ Poets ” was his answer. “ To-day we have poets,” she said. “ Now we would have for poetry a ‘ hearth and roof tree,’ for poetry is not a luxury in the life of a nation.”

Five shillings a word was recently offered to Air Rudyard Kipling for an article, it was stated, by Mr Gilbert Erankau at the annual luncheon of the Kipling Society, at Prince’s Galleries, London, on June 5. “ This,” continued Mr Frankau, “is the only time that England has ever been able to compete with America on the dollar basis. Mr Kipling refused the offer with contempt, * saying he never wrote to order.” The Earl of Birkenhead described Mr Kipling as “ a great storyteller, a great poet, and a great patriot.” “His allegiance to the Empire, and particularly to the private soldier and the subaltern,” he continued, “ has always struck me as a very characteristic tendency in the work of Mr Kipling. Surely no one has ever quite understood with such vivid intuition what the private soldier was saying and thinking.” Major-general L. C. Dunsterville, the hero of “ Stalky and C 0.,” presided.

Of all the copies of the First Folio cf Shakespeare in the world Mr Henry C. Folger (Washington) is said to own onefourth, and these include the only known copy of the first collected edition, in/ quarto; the Burdett-Coutts copy which has long been considered one of the three first in existence, and the unique Sibthorp or Vincent copy, uncut and in original biriding, and probably one of the very first copies printed. The Sibthorp copy was discovered in a coach house at Carwick Hall, England, the seat of Coningsby C. Sibthorp, by a member of the London firm of Sotheran and Co., who had gone to weed out worthless items and catalogue the rest. The folio lay on top of a case of books, and as the assistant handed it down he said, “ No good, sir, only old poetry.” Mr Railton, of Sotheran, saw at once what it was.

The decision of Mr Sidney Webb, the well-known writer on labour topics, to retire from the House of Commons has recalled the memory that he was once an income tax official, and attempted, with quite unsatisfactory results, to collect an income tax from Robert Browning, the poet. Browning wrote that if bothered by any more demands for income tax he would pack up and go back to Italy to live. Tradition has it that this threat sufficed, and he lived in England? in peace thereafter. It was Sir Walter Scott, however, who surpassed Browning’s achievement. When a demand for income taxes was made on him in 1813 Scott refused to pay on the ground that, just as a harvest of timber

was not subject to the property taxes because it repiesented 30 years of labour, the profits from a copyright ought not to be taxed, because they might easily represent the labour of as many years. Remarkably enough, the Treasury upheld this position, and ruled that literarywork should pay no income tax at all.

Alcibiades, you may remember, was one of the bad lots of classical history—how bad is indicated by Mr E. F. Benson in his introduction to his “ Life ” of that ancient Greek, who was born in Athens in 450 b.c., and killed by the arrows of the Spartans 46 years later. “We have far more information (says Mr Benson) about the boyhood and youth of Alcibiades (most of it highly picturesque and unedifying) than about that of any other famous or infamous personage in the whole of history.” With such a wealth of information we shall expect in this book a lively account of the doings of a man whom even the friendship and advice of Socrates could not influence for good.

.Most of the notable actresses who niight be seen coming out of “ The Stage Door” at any time between 1700 and 1800 are Mr Lewis Melville’s subjects in a book of that title. They include the famous Peg Woffington, Lavinia Fenton (the original Polly of “The Beggar’s Opera ”), Mrs Siddons, Suzannah Sheridan, mother of the playwright, Nance Oldfield, and Harriet Mellon, who married Thomas Coutts, the millionaire banker. All were nearly as famous off the stage as on, so there should be plenty of material for a lively book. ** * "

Rudolf G. Binding, the author of “ A Fatalist at War,” was a German staff officer who was secretly in revolt against the horrible wastage of life that went on all round him for four years. He was, apparently, more of a philosophic than a military turn of mind, and he was made a fatalist by the war years, which convinced him that everything could be destroyed save the human spirit, but that the individual spirit could be strong enough to conquer fate itself.

Charles G. Harper, that industrious compiler of literary topographies, has taken for the subject of his next book “The Bunyan Country.” Mr Harper, after an intensive study of the country which would be familiar to the tinker of Bedford, has identified manv of the places in “The Pilgrim’s Progress”: The House Beautiful as the Manor House, the Delectable Mountains as the Chiltern Hills, and the Valley of the Shadow of Death as a ravine at Ampthill, near Bedford. The book will be illustrated by the author’s sketches and by reproductions of old pictures < * *

There should be some interesting sidelights, on Napoleonic history in “The Memoirs of Queen Hortense.” For Hortense de Beauharnais, daughter of the Empress Josephine by her first marriage, became not only stepdaughter of Napoleon,, but also his sister-in-law bv her marriage to the Emperor’s brother Louis afterwards King of Holland. On Napoleon’s downfall Hortense fled to Switzerland, and there wrote her memoirs, the greater part of which have never been published. They passed on the writer s death to her youngest son afterwards Napoleon 111, from him to the late Empress Eugenie, and so into the possession of Prince Napoleon who was preparing them for publieation’when lie died two years ago. “BLUE MAGIC”: A BOOK OF VERSE. We learn with pleasure that a selection of the poems of Miss Marna Service is to be published shortly. The book will take its name from her poem Blue Magic,” which is in every sense an outstanding achievement in colour and atmosphere. “Blue Magic” was ■written when Miss Service w-as at school in Duyxlin, and, as she has lived in that city all her life, her work will create a wide local interest. Her verses reveal an author who possesses rare imaginative qualities and deep penetration into the world of mysticism. There are flashes of fire in her poetry which stir the reader and set one wondering how this young writer really “ does ” it. Miss Service’s prose work is not unknown to readers of the Otago Witness, but it is by her verse that she has come to be recognised as one of the most promising New Zealand poets. We understand that the book will be embellished with some charming illustrations in silhouette by tlfat clever artist Miss Alison Grant. We are not, of course, familiar with all the poems included in the forthcoming book, but if only those we have read were there “ Blue Magic ” would be well worth possession.

“ Ninety-nine per cent, of the women do not exercise any taste at all,” observed Mr Justice Reed, in the Wellington Supreme Court the other day, when the colour of a certain dress material which figured as an exhibit was being discussed (states the Evening Post). “ They follow blindly like sheep, one after the other.”