Untitled

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20669, 6 March 1937, Page 12 (Supplement)

Dr Goebbels opened the “German Book Week” at Weimar. The motto for the week was “A nation lives on its books.” The address was to be followed by the nation-wide distribution of 19,000,000 catalogues, intended to stimulate a general interest in good literature.

Why db people buy books? Messrs Simon and Schuster, the New York publishers, have for the last seven years been trying to find out, by means of referendum cards bound up in all their publications. They are postcards, return postage prepaid, asking readers whether the book lived up to their expectations, and what caused them to buy it. A recent analysis of cards returnee from one book showed:— Newspaper reviews 192 Magazine reviews 67 Friends’ recommendations .. 86 Advertising 83 Gifts 26 Saw it in a bookshop window 4 Saw it in a bookshop 14 Salesman recommended it .. 7 Miscellaneous .. .. 42 Examples of A. E. Housman’s tart wit are still cropping up. Here is one culled from Mr A. Edward Newton’s “Bibliograhpy and Pseudo-Biblio-graphy.” An American bibliographer, seeing that a new edition of “A Shropshire Lad" was announced, wrote to HoUsman aS follows:—“I highly value my copy of the first edition; is there anything new Important in your last?” To this Housman replied: “No, only a few new blunders replacing the old ones.” Mr Newton’s book, which the Oxford University Press is publishing in England, consists of three lectures delivered on the foundation established by Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach, the famous American collector and bookseller. That their appeal is not narrowly circumscribed will be gathered from Mr Newton’s confession that he is “a man who gets more pleasure out of reading a book than finding blunders in it.”