The Faggot-

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 749, 23 August 1929, Page 14

The Faggot -

A Bookman’s Bundle WRITING in the “Manchester Guardian,” consideration has been given by “A.N.M.” to the records of the use made of two ships* libraries by members of the crew. One was a cargo liner, the other a tramp. It is remarkable that the most popular book on the cargo liner was Mr Lytton Strachey’s “Queen Victoria ” and then follow Irving’s “Coronel and the Falklands,” and Brighouse’s “Captain Shapely.” A bo’sun’s reading included Strachey, Cervantes and Lafcadio Hearn; and a deck-boy, besides “King Solomon’s Mines,” took Trevelyan’s “History of England,” Agate’s “White Horse and Red Lion,” and Strachey’s “Queen Victoria.” One wonders, too, how a lampman got on with “The Little French Girl.” On the tramp steamer the library was but fifty volumes, and in the course of five months one member of the crew read twenty-five of them. Favourite writers here were “Sapper” and Buchan, with Quiller-Couch, Conrad, Montague and Wells near them. Without attaching special significance to particular lists, it is intert esting to find a demand for Boswell’s “Life of Johnson,” Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall,” “The Last Days of Pompeii,” and “Lavengro.” ■* *• •* M. Andrd Maurois recently paid flying visit to Greece in order to consult Greek scholars and study the topography of Missolonghi and its environs in connection with a “Life of Byron” which he is now engaged in writing. Within less than a week lie not only attended to the serious business that brought him to Greece, but found time to lecture before the Parnassus Literary Society on the contemporary novel, give numerous newspaper interviews and attend several social functions given in his honour.

The prize offered by “The Atlantic Monthly,” £IOOO for the most interesting biography of any kind, has been awarded to Harriet Connor Brown, of Washington, for her memoir of her mother-in-law, Mrs Maria D. Brown. The elder Mrs Brown died last January at the age of 101, and during some years previous her daughter-in-law had taken down her answers to questions on the early days of the North-west Territory and recollections of earlier generations. The late Mrs Brown’s grandfather was a contemporary and friend of General Israel Putnam, and the book will be called “ Grandmother Brown’s Hundred Years.”