AS BOMBS FALL

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 63, Issue 4465, 18 August 1941, Page 2

AS BOMBS FALL

BRITAIN READS DICKENS. RETURN TO GREAT LITERATURE OF THE PAST. What is Britain reading down in -,he shelters while the Luftwaffe zooms across the black sky? There is quite striking evidence of a big return to the great literature of the past. In the opening months of the present year the demand for reprints of nearly one thousand of the world’s best books was half as high again as in 1940. Best-selling authors in this Everyman library were Dickens, Thackeray, Dr. Johnson, Pepys, Bunyan, Defoe, Chaucer, Keats, Burns, Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Dumas, Tolstoy, Plato and Shakespeare. The most popular authors in overseas countries have been very much the same as those at home, though, in proportion, some of the more serious authors are rather more in demand abroad, particularly Aristotle, Gibbon, Voltaire Rousseau, Walt Whitman. Not one of nearly 200,000 volumes shipped from the library to the United States has been lost. Indeed, since the war began only one per cent of those sent to overseas countries have been lost by enemy action; and exports have been over one-third of more than 1,000,000 books sold in that period.