The Library Corner

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19532, 13 March 1926, Page 1 (Supplement)

The Library Corner

By

“Bibliophile”

| “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swaDcwcd, | I and some few to be chewed and digested. ’ ’—Bacon.

“BEYOND THE BALTIC.” (By A. AIACCALLI’AT SCOTT: Thornton, Butterwyorth. Ltd., LondoiO. The landlocked tideless Balti*' was of more importune*' in ancient times than is usually believe*!. Mr Belloe has written with his usual charm and confidence upon th*' service rendered to European civilisation by Rome, but Air A. AfacCallum Scott, in his “Beyond the Baltic.” claims that the Scandinavian north developed a race which has contributed some of the best elements to Western character. The book is not a history nor a guide book, but primarily a travel book, containing a straightforward report of what the author saw and heard in some of the little-known backlands of Europe. II is tour included Leningrad, Moscow. Latvia, Poland. Lithuania and Estonia.

His studies led him to the conclusion that the Viking strain may be traced all over Europe, and played an important part in Eastern Europe. When the Norsemen were harrying Britain the Baltic A’ikings wore at Novgorod and Kiev, and on their way to plunder the suburbs of Constantinople. The chief interest of the book to the ordinary reader will centre in the descriptions of Soviet Russia, and on Hi is subject Air Scott seems to write with frank ness and sound judgment. He believes the Revolution has made Russia once more an Asiatic State; that the thing which is growing up in Russia is not Communism, but Government by Chartered Company, like the old East India Company. His description of Leningrad, a city still living under the shadow of the terror, is unusually in teresting. Driving from the station he noted blocks of unoccupied houses, grass growing in some side streets, whole areas devastated, marks or rifle bullets on walls, the Nevsky Prospect no longer gay and brilliant, but delapidated and frowsy, the people in lhe streets shabbilv dressed, ami a com-

plete absence of joy. Beggars swarm ed. Moscow is a greater city than over before. Its population has increase*! by a million. There is a note of gaiety in lhe air, but it is the metallic gaiety of fatalism. In Leningrad the temporary encouragement of private enterprise in business is now being cheeked, and the State is drivjng private business off the field by oppressive taxation. The sufferings of the professional class are terrible. One meal a day is all they can afford. The spv svstom is perfect. Thousands of students have been expelled from the universities simply because they ar*' of bourgeois origin. The Boshoviks are concentrating their efforts on Britain, Fran*-.' ami Germany. They want the revolution to come simultaneously- in them all. On

the high wall looking down upon the chapel in Aloscow are the oft-quoted words of Lenin. “Religion is the opium of the people.” Religion is despised by the powers, but not prohibited.

Th*' author tells the story of the excavating of a grave for Lenin by blasting the frozen soil with dynamite, and how the blasting broke the main sewer, and in the spring the filth flooded 1 e tomb. “There he now lies in his native element,” they say. The story is not quoted as true, but simply as Russians toll it. The other chapters of this striking book are devoted to new republies which have grown out of the former Russian empire, and which form a series of buffer States between Soviet Russia and Western Europe. The frontiers mark differences of race, language and religion. These new Baltic States are preparing for the time when the Russian giant will have recovered his strength. Efforts, not A('ry successful, are being ma*>e to form a Baltic league. The book is well furnished with maps and illustrations, and contains a mass ot useful information ami much insight into little-known facts.

DO WE BUY BOOKS? (By “ALPHA OF THE PLOUGH,” in “Current Literature of the Month.”) T have recently been in the throes of a double removal, and in the course of the operation comments were made by one person or another concerned in it off the prominence of books in my belongings. The van-man. with a large experienc of removal, paid the tribute of astonishment at the. spectacle, and the people who came to look at the house gaped at the books as though they were the last thing they expected to see in a decent suburban residence. • Hitherto I had been rather ashamed of my Jibrary. In the course of a longish life 1 have accumulated some .”>OOO books. There is not much rubbish among them, for I have thinned them out periodically, but there are shameful blanks that are unfilled, ami it. had never occurred to mo to think that they formed an unusual collection for a middle-class household. But the inquiries I have made since lead me to the conclusion that thev do, and that in Ute average suburban home the last thing that is thought, about is the furnishing of a librarv. People who will spend many hundreds and even thousands of pounds in the course of years in making their house acautiful never give a serious thought to books. They will ransack London for suitable fittings, for rugs and hangngs, china and cut-glass mirrors and vhat-nots, but the idea of providing! ;hemselves with a moderate and welb ' selected library doos not occur to them, f they gather books at all they gather hem haphazard ami without thought I I well-known publisher told me *th(|

other day that he was recently asked to equip a library in a new house in North London, and the instructions he received was to provide books that would : fit the shelves which had been fixed. ; It was not the contents of the books . that mattered but lhe size. I This was no doubt an exceptional I case, but it does represent, something of the attitude of the average man to . books. People who will spend one hun- . dred and fifty pounds on a piano as a , matter of course will not spend ton . pounds a rear or even five pounds a . year in enriching their homes with all the best thought of all time. Go into [ any average provincial town and the > thing you will find is a decenet > bookshop. I recall more than one great ; industrial town of a population of over a hundred thousand which has only one such shop, and that is generally kept going by the sale of school books. It is not because we cannot afford to buy books. We spend two hundred mil- , lions sterling a year on boor and I doubt whether we spend two hundred million pence on literature. Many people can afford to buy motor-ears at ■ anything from two hundred pounds who would be aghast at lhe idea of spending half a guinea occasionally on a book. They think so meanly of theiz minds as that. •“!. merely as furniture, books aro a cheaper and better decoration than blue china or Chippendale chairs. They are better because they put the signature of individuality upon a house, lhe taste tor ( hippondale chairs and blue china may In- a mere vanity, a piece of coxcombry and ostentation, % fancy that represents not a genuine personal taste for beautiful things, but an artificial passion for rare or expensive things. But a row of books will give a house chai actor and meaning. It will tell you about its owner. It is a window let, into |J ;( . landscape of his life. M hen J go into a stranger’s library I wander round the bookshelves to learn what sort of a person the stranger is, and when ho comes in I i 1 eel 1 know the kt y to his mind and the range of his interests. A house without books is a mindless and a characterless house, no matter how rich the Persian rugs and how elegant the settees and the ornaments. The Persian lugs only tell you* that the owner has got money but the books will tell you whether he dins got a mind as well. I was staying not long ago in a northern town with a man who had a great house and line grounds, two or three motor-cars, a billiard room, and a multitude of other luxuries. The only thing he had not got was books. Am] the effect left on the mind by all his splendours was that he was a pauper. “And where are your books?” asked a famous bookman of my acquaintance who was being shown over a West End palace by the owner, who in the last 20 years had made a colossal fortune. in the City, was the plutocrat’s unblushing reply. He gloried in his povll is not a question of money. I repeat that books arc the cheapest as vzell as lhe best part of the equipment oi a house. You can begin your library with the expenditure of a couple of -shillings. Nearly all the best literature in the world is at your command <it _s a xolume. Tor yon can get a library of 50 books which contain ‘ riches fmeless.” liven if you don’t read them yourself, they are a priceless investment for your children. Holmes used to say that it took three generations of sprawling in a library to create a reading man; but 1 believe that any intelligent child who stumbles upon, let us say. Herodotus, or “Two > ears Before the Mast.” or Prescott’s 4 'Conquest of Peru,” or any similar masterpiece will be caught bv lhe glamour of books and will contract the reading habit for life. And what hnbit is there to compa. j with it! A hat delight is there like the revelation of books, the sudden impact of a master-spirit, lhe sense of windows hung, wide open Io the universe? It is these adventures of the mind, the joy of which does not pass away that give lhe adventure of life itself beauty and fragrance, and make it—h’i<‘h as the oozy bottom of the deep, With sunken wreck and sunless treasuries. LITERARY NOTES. ( harm, humour, and sympathy may all be found in Mrs Coulson Kernahan’s“lalks to Women.” which provide 30 addresses of special interest to mothers and working women generally, lhe value of the book lies tn lhe fact that lhe author has had personal experience of the subpeets with which she deals. Rich in suggestion, a wide field >t thought is opened up by the many topics diseased, so that all those who speak at rethers’ meetings or similai gat It rings would do well to real it. It may come as a surprise to s »ni* to barn that cannibalism still survives in the remote corners of the earth, one of these being the island of New Guinea (says an English paper). Until comparatively recently loathenism in this land took the most revolting vforms, but just over .”>0 wars’ labour by the Australian Methodist Church has d»>ne much towards 'stamping it out. Ihe fascinating storv is (old in “Our Task in Papua,” by* the Rev. John Wear Burton, )L\., the secretary of the Methodist Missionary Sodoty, who recently visited the country. Ph ere are many illustrations from photographs giving a good idea of the jicturesque nature of the country and ictails of the work.