ODDS AND ENDS

Southland Times, Issue 23816, 13 May 1939, Page 14

ODDS AND ENDS

It appears from the Prussian Bible Society that, in spite of the official insistence that every house shall have its copy of “Mein Kampf,” the Bible is still the best-seller in Germany. Sales of the Scriptures are stated to have outnumbered those of the Fuhrer’s book by some 200,000 copies in the course of a year.

Hilaire Belloc confesses that he is no longer averse to fiction which makes

him move among the very rich. The illusion, he finds, is a pleasant one.

A permanent school for librarians is being established by the Public Librarian of New South Wales at the request of the Government. It is to open immediately, so that librarians will be available when the Government’s new policy for library service in the country comes into operation in January. Municipal and shire councils throughout the state are to be helped to establish and maintain libraries.

Longmans have in preparation a series of books called “Ambassadors at Large,” intended to state the “recent history, the policy and the aims of the principal Powers today.” Each volume is written by an author representative of his country, the first being “France,” by Count Wladimir d’Ormesson, and the second “Italy,” by Professor Camillo Pelizzi.

Another new series of pocket-size sixpennies has just been launched by Hutchinson and Company, called, the Pocket Library of Sports and Pastimes. The first two volumes issued are “The Book of Swimming and Diving,” by Sid G. Hedges, and “Yachting on a Small Income” by Maurice Griffiths.

A new book by Lawrence of Arabia will be published shortly. Entitled “Oriental Assembly,” it contains all his writings on the East which have not hitherto been collected. There is the

diary which Lawrence kept during a journey on foot through Northern Syria in 1911, when he studied crusaders’ castles. The diary will be illustrated with Lawrence’s own photographs and sketches.

C. Daly King, the detective story writer, is a professional psychologist. He graduated from Yale in 1916, and then did graduate work in psychology at Columbia. Since then he has published such psychological treatises as “Beyond Behaviourism,” “Integrative Psychology” and “Psychology of Consciousness.” t

A fine copy of Cicero’s “De Senectute,” from the press of William Caxton (1481), fetched £lOBO at the London sale of the library of Mortimer Schiff, the New York banker. One of the four perfect copies known of Thomas Betson’s “A Ryght Profytable Treatyse,” printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1500, went for £135, and a 1653 copy of Thomas a Kempis’s “De Imitatione Christi” for £145.