STRAY LEAVES

Timaru Herald, Volume CXL, Issue 20261, 9 November 1935, Page 12

STRAY LEAVES

DOINGS IN WORLD OF BOOKS £2lO was paid recently for the autograph draft of Mr Kipling’s ‘Mandalay.’ Large sums have been paid for Kipling’s manuscripts—£Boo for 30 lines of ‘The White Man’s Burden’; £630 for ‘Recessional;’ £550 for ‘With Scindia to Delhi;’ and £SOO for ‘Ahmed Shah.’ Four books have been completed by Sir John Squire for early publication. He has written a volume of reminiscences and a book on the sound of words. Another book is one of a series of volumes concerning Shakespeare, and a fourth is a selection of comic verse. One of the pioneers of modern colour illustration was Nico Jungman, a painter who was born in Holland, but made his home in England and became a British subject. He died in London recently. For some years Mr Jungman had given his principal attention to the restoration of works by old masters. “No” is pronounced “hoa” all over the country districts of North Lincolnshire. A story is told of a diocesan inspector who asked a boy the following question: “Can you tell me who built the Ark?” “NOa, sir,” he replied. "Quite right, my boy,” the inspector answered, much to the boy’s amazement. Miss Clemence Dane said that of all books the most popular continues to be the family novel. Year after year it reappears, is read, and, the best test, is remembered. Trollope remains one of the most popular of Victorian authors, and ‘The Forsyte Saga’ is still the bible of modern family youth. Sir John Squire, who founded the “London Mercury,” and retired from Its editorship, is the author of three books being published in London. The first is a study of “Shakespeare as a Dramatist.” In the second, “Flowers of Speech,” he will offer an introduction to the general enjoyment of literature —of words, their sounds and meanings, of literary forms, and so on. Tire title of the third is "Reflections and Memories.” Fiction from the United States has been receiving a good deal of consideration in England. Americans are now producing more first class stories about third-class people than any other writers in the world, remarks Mr H. E. Bates. Mr Allan Monkhouse says that it is difficult to see how the World can be carried on by such society as we read about in American novels. Mr James Hilton notes the popularity in America of a new vernacular school of fiction that disdains anything bookish, dislikes anything bookish, dislikes punctuation, avoids Where possible words of more than one or two syllables, prefers compound sentences to complex, and portrays by a kind of pungent unliteraryness the moods and manners of its age. The strong points of the school, Mr Hilton says, are its virility, its candour, and its economy of words. Where it loses is in its tendency to make simplicity an end rather than a means, so that the net result is merely the over-simple masquerading as the over-subtle.