STRAY LEAVES

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 20077, 6 April 1935, Page 12

STRAY LEAVES

DOINGS IN WORLD OF BOOKS The oldest German newspaper, the Muenchen Augsburg, founded in 1609, ceased publication on January 1 last. A prize of £2OO for the best detective novel submitted not later than July 1, 1935, is offered by John Long Ltd., 34-36 Paternoster row, London, E. C. 4., in co-operation with Doubleday, Doran, and Co. Inc., of New York. After nine years’ research, the National Institute for the Blind has designed a new kind of printing press for books that are not in sufficient demand to justify the issue of the ordinary stereotyped edition. Previously such books had to be copied by hand from the original, causing weeks of work.

Mr A. E. Coppard thinks that the present generation of novelists would benefit by studying Henry James. That author, Mr Coppard says, had some very clear ideas to how a story should be conceived, worked and finally built up, and a few lessons from him would soon bring a change for the better.

“Experience” the third volume of Desmond MacCarthy’s collected essays has just been published by Putnam. As with the first two books “Portraits” and “Criticism,” there will be an edition de luxe .limited to 100 copies as well as the ordinary edition. A new feature of “Experience” is in the essays which record Mr MacCarthy’s personal experiences and “things seen.”

“Professor Edward Heick has just announced in the columns of the ‘Volkischer Beobachter’ that he has discovered that Dante was of Nordic origin,” says II Messagero,” of Rome, as translated in “World.” "He then proceeds to prove that the surname Alighieri was merely the Italianised form of Aligern. It only remains for some ardent Italian to prove by the same method of deduction that Wolfgango Gothe was an Italian, and that gango ‘Goethe’ was an Italian, and that ‘Goethe’ was merely a Germanised “The great American novel” has been provided in sections, according to a writer in the “New York Times Book Review.” In a collection which was offered for sale recently the North-West w'as represented by Jack London, Califoria, by Stewart Edward White, the South-West by Alfred Henry Lewis, the Western prairies by Frederic Remington, the Middle West by Hamlin Garland, Kansas by Edgar W. Howe, Indiana by Edward Eggleston, the Delta by George W. Cable, the Great Smoky Mountains by Charles Egbert Craddock, the Deep South by Thames Nelson Fage, Virginia by John Fsten Cooke, Pennsylvania by Margaret Deland, New York by Harold Frederic, the Adirondacks by Philander Deming, New England by Sarah Orne Jewett, Cape Cod by Joseph C. Lincoln, and many other localities bu authors who were familiar with them.