The Library Corner

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19443, 31 October 1925, Page 17 (Supplement)

The Library Corner

By

“Bibliophile”

"Stale toots are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. " —Bacon,

ISLAND BEADERS. WHAT APPEALS TO THEM. Jack M‘ Laron, the Australian story writer as an i nter e ß ting article in ‘‘ T.P. 's and Cassell’s Weekly, ” in which he tells of some of the readers he has found on lonely Pacific Islands. He writes:— Down there in the Islands vou will find many real lovers of books. I knew a New Guinea trader who lived on so isolated a part of the coast that for months at a time he saw no other white, and whose thatched bungalow was a library. He was an old man, with deep-set, puckered eyes, and the manner and speech of a man of education, and he gave one the feeling that, instead of being alone, he was in the midst of a crowd—a queer, indeter? minate feeling which would be explained when he indicated the innumerable and the well-cared-for books lining the thatch of the walls and said that within the covers of each volume was quite a number of friends. 4 ‘And many of them I know better than I f could ever hope to know—you for instance,” he would say. “Their thoughts, reasons for actions, aspirations, hatreds—l know them all! Why, I know hundreds and hundreds of people inside out—know them better than I know myself!” CONRAD AND OTHERS. Conrad is a great favourite in ‘hose lands “down under.” Boarding a lonely lightship of the Barrier Beef—that mighty coral structure which for a thousand miles or more is the Coral Sea’s greatest menace —I found the captain deep in “Lord Jim,” and the crew of four debating about the short story “Youth.” Each of the crew was an ex-sailing-ship captain, and each gave his opinion as to what he would have done had he been in the predicament in which the captain in the story found himself. They agreed finally that Conrad’s way out of the difficulty was the way they would have taken." Mr Kipling is another favourite—his prose tales rather than his verse—so, also, is Mr IL G. Wells; but the Mr Weils of the pseudo-scientific stories lather than Mr Wells the sociologist. Mr Masefield’s ‘ 1 Everlasting Mercy ’ ’ is on many a lugger and plantation, and I have often come across a wellworn copy of that writer’s “A Mainsail Haul.” Air Bernard Shaw am.’ Mr Arnold Bennett are well represented, and also the Australian poet, Air Henry Lawson, Air Thomas Burke is there in great numbers.

Then there are the works of Sir Hall Caine, Air A. S. AL Hutchinson, Sir Rider Haggard, and Sir A. Conan Doyle—which arc now chiefly read by the older of the white dwellers in those black lands —and Joseph Hergesheimer, William M‘Fee, Alice Hogan Rice and Jack London. PERSONAL ASSOCIATION. Jack London has of course a personal association with the South Seas, he having spent a deal of time there during the course of his wanderings in the Snark, and all who met him liked him. There was about Jack London that quality of honesty of purpose and forthrightness which is so apparent in his books. Indeed, no writer could be more like his writings; to be in his company and to hear him talk was exactly like reading one of his books —notably “Martin Eden”; one felt the same urge to be up and doing things, to be a man, to live.

I came across another writer with personal association with the South Seas. Entering a New Guineas harbour in a schooner one quiet night, I heard as we neared the shore the taptapping of a typewriter. The captain pointed to where, moored near the shore, loomed a queer craft —a large native canoe with a house of European design on it. “A novelist,” he said. “She lives alone, and writes her books, on that canoe.” It was Aliss Beatrice Grimshaw. VARIETY IN TASTE. Nat Gould’s horse-racing yarns are all over the place; in a plantation overseer’s bungalow I once found a complete set of the whole of this writer’s books, the owner and collector of which was a once-famous jockey who, convicted of irregularities in riding many years ago. turned his back on civilisation and went to the Islands. Tales of wild adventure are also greatly favoured. A pearl-diver 1 knew swallowed such tales whole, as fast as he could get them, and was full of admiration of the courage of the various alleged heroes. “Now, there’s a game bloke!” he would say admiringly of one of these fictitious persons. “I don’t kfiow how he could have had the. courage to do that!” Yet, that pearl-diver, in his explorings of the sea-floor, faced every day of hi.s life the risk of his air-pipe fatally fouling, the bursting of blood vessels from over-pressure, spinal paralysis, attack from sharks—faced far greater and realer dangers than any of the persons he read about and so admired. “ But that’s nothing;” he said when I pointed this out to him. “I'm only earning my living!”

ATMOSPHERE. WHERE WRITERS FIND IT. In what surroundings does the litef* ary craftsman obtain his best inspiration? To many successful playwrights and novelists the whirling bustle of the great city acts like a tonic; others find soothing balm in the serenity of the countryside. Some prefer a combination of both; thus two such diverse types of genius as Sir James Barrie and Bernard Shaw both find in the peace of the Adelphia haven from London’s strife, yet at the same time contrive to keep closely enough in touch with the world’s pageant of humanity. Suburbia is supposed to be synonymous with dull, soul-destroying routine, yet. men dowered with the priceless gift of imagination in such high degree as John Drinkwater, the poet-dramatist, and John Galsworthy, who can distil dramatic essence from the leaves of a dull family diary, have produced delightful work amid what some people affect to regard as the “wilderness” of Clapham and Hampstead respectively. A pleasant corner of his own Wessex, just outside sleepy Dorchester, has for long been both home and work shop to Thomas Hardy. G. K. Chesterton finds that he docs his best work amid the bcechy uplands of Bucking hamshire, near Beaconsfield. It is to the sunny skies of the Riviera that W. J. Locke has flown for inspiration for his emotional character studies. Sussex, land of fertile weald and rolling down, has quite a colony of its own, referred to as “the Sussex Gang. ” Among these are numbered Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who weaves fascinating stories of mystery on the breezy heights of Crowborough, and Rudyard Kipling, who summons his military muse in the abiding calm of a village called Burwash.

But perhaps the quaintest spot chosen by any writer for working purposes is the fifteenth century millhouse

at. Bosham, Sussex, where Captain H. AL Harwood and his wife, Tennyson Jesse, write plays. CIRCULATING LIBRARIES. STORY OF THE FOUNDER. To admirers of the pastoral poet Allan Ramsay this year brings round the occurrence of a dual bicentenary lof great interest, says an English writer. About this period of the year 1725 Ramsay established in Edinburgh the first circulating library known in Scotland; a few months earlier he had given to the world one of the finest !of all pastoral poems in our literature, “The Gentle Shepherd.” It was from a famous building at the east end of the Luckenbooths, facing down the High Street, that Scotland’s first circulating library was issued. Here in after years Creech, the most renowned of Scottish booksellers, was the centre of a coterie of a literary giants, which included Kames, Smith, Hume, Alackenzie, and Burns. Allan Ramsay’s circulating library diffused plays and works of fiction among the people of Edinburgh, and t.< his shop the citizens sent their children with a penny for his latest poem, which he printed and.sold as it wan written.

Ramsay's pioneer library, however, was not established without opposition on the part of the authorities. They found fault with the poet-publisher for lending the loose plays of the age to persons whose morals were likely to be tainted by such reading. So in 1728 wc find the magistrates, moved by some meddling spirits, taking action against the poet. One of the complaints made to the authorities was that Ramsay got down books of plays from London, lending them out at an easy rate, boys, servant women, and gentlemen all alike taking advantage, of this arrangement, “whereby vice and obscenity were dreadfully propagated. ’ ’ The magistrates first decided to make an inspection of the ledger in which Ramsay kept a list of subscribers to his library; and the result of this scrutiny so alarmed them that they next determined to proceed to his shop and examine the books which he stocked for lending. “But,” wc are told, “he had notice an hour before, and had withdrawn some of the worst, and nothing was done to purpose.” . So the attempt to stop the circulating library failed completely; but Ramsay’s detractors continued to persecute him in pamphlets and articles containing scurrilous attacks on the poet-pub-lisher. One of these diatribes dealt with “the flight of religious piety from Scotland upon the account of Ramsay ’s lewd books and the hell-bred play-house comedians, who debauch all the faculties of the souls of the rising generation”—the latter a reference, to Ramsay’s support, of the. movement to establish a theatre in Edinburgh. Allan on one occasion addressed a rhyming complaint to the Court of Session, though it does not appear tc have procured him any redress against his attackers; and he appears to have remained satisfied with his published “Reasons for not answering the Hackney Scribblers.”