Atlantic Shop-Talk

TALKING shop is after all only a sublimated form of gossip, and half the fun of gossip is in telling the other fellow what still another fellow has told you. Now Mr. James Truslow Adams, the author of The Founding of New England, just issued by the Atlantic Monthly Press, has been telling us — on request, let us hasten to interject

— something about himself and the point of view from which he has looked upon his undertaking; and what he says is well worth repeating.

In the first place he tells us: ‘My ancestors came not only from the North and the South in the United States, but from North and South America. They were settled in the latter a half-century before the Mayflower sailed from England, and I yield to none of the Mayflower descendants in my love for America and the New World.'

Thus more American than the New Englander, though without a drop of Now England blood in his veins, Mr. Adams has approached the historical study of New England from a new angle, and this is what he says about it : —

‘My ambition has been to write as an American anxious to know the truth, not as a New Englander anxious to foster a tradition. I think the men of to-day, especially the young men, want to know the truth, about themselves, about the present, about the past. It is the most hopeful sign of the times. The men and women of the past were just men and women like those of today, and the problems of the past were not simple, but complex like those of to-day. To think of them as all of heroic mould, living a life animated solely by devotion to religion and liberty,

— as those two terms are understood to-day, and in a world in which the only complications were introduced by savages and bishops,— is to picture a life and setting that never existed or could exist. In studying the New England past, I have simply tried to learn what these people who came to America were really like; why did they come? what did they do? what were really their political and religious ideas? what were their relations with the outside world, into which, willingly or unwillingly, they had of necessity to enter? In doing this, I have had no more local prejudice than if I had been treating a colony of Athens instead of England.'

In this year of the Pilgrim Tercentenary, so detached a view of New England and its people will be none too common. It is the very thing that may be counted upon to make Mr. Adams’s book much more than a 1921 model of historical writing.

The articles on education by Edward Yeomans of Chicago, which have appeared from time to time in the Atlantic and are now brought together with others of the same nature, in a volume called Shackled Youth, must have been having their effect. Or is it simply that they express a feeling that is ‘in the air ?

However that may be, we have just received from Mr. Howard Bement, of the Hill School, Pottstown, Pa., a letter from which these reflections have directly proceeded. It picks out another Atlantic book, of which we had never entertained a pedagogic thought, namely, The Amenities of Book-Collecting, by A. Edward Newton, and holds it up to schoolmasters as just the thing for which they have been looking. Thus he writes:

’I wonder if you realize what a godsend to the teacher of English in preparatory schools Newton’s The. Amenities of Book-Collecting and Kindred Affections is? For hoys who are to be made ready for the Comprehensive Examination the book is invaluable: it is interesting per se, it is well written, it gives the struggling student atmosphere and background, and, best of all, it stimulates and widens his latent feeling for things bookish. More than twenty of my students read the book last year, and I am again recommending it. The more I see of the book, and the closer my observation of boys’ reaction to it, the more am I convinced that it is worth a dozen ordinary texts.’

Another hook by Mr. Newton, to be called A Magnificent Farce, and to continue the vein of the Amenities, is in preparation. Wherever the litterœ humaniores are considered, it will repeat the appeal of his earlier book.

The results of the contest among readers of Everyday Adventures, by Samuel Scoville, Jr., to produce the best page for the advertising of the book are set forth earlier in this issue of the Atlantic. Competitions of this sort always disclose interesting points quite apart from the results. One of them, in the present instance, has been the wide distribution of the competitors, who are scattered, as by an impartial hand, throughout the United States, literally from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Another point has been the occasional superiority of a letter accompanying a trial advertisement to the advertisement itself. This is well illustrated in a letter that says, among other things: ’I am one of those New York “cliff-dwellers,” and you may imagine how precious a breath of the country is to one who dodges into a tube in the morning and “chutes” down to work—then dodges back to the tube again and “chutes" back home— home, an apartment that might be likened to one of the ancient “holesin-the-wall" of the old cliff-dwellers in the Grand Canyon. Is n’t. it lovely once in a while to get hold of a book that lets you down comfortably — instead of pitching you over an intellectual cliff into an abyss of conflicting emotions? ’

We make no scruple of a little boasting about a recent performance of the Atlantic Monthly Press. In the month of January Professors Pearson and Rogers, of the English Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to us with a book manuscript they had edited, and a tale of woe. The book was an anthology of prose and verse, The Voice of Science in Ninelecnth-Cciltury Literature: the tale of woe, that arrangements for the immediate publication had miscarried, and that the Institute sophomores, who were expected to take up the study of the book on March 21, might have to do without it. Could we help them out of their predicament? We talked the matter over, found the book to be one that we should be glad to add to our list of educational texts, and agreed to deliver it, a finished product, at the Technology bookstore on March 10. This promise was punctually fulfilled with the delivery of five hundred copies of a gold-stamped, gilt-top, cloth-bound book of 340 pages!

Teachers of English in other institutions have not yet learned how graphically the hook reveals the literary expression of the great scientific movement of the nineteenth century. But they will.

The special ‘signs of spring’ in the Atlantic office are the publication of Bird Stories, the second volume in Miss Edith M. Patch’s ‘Little Gateways to Science,’and of an Erery-year Garden Calendar, prepared by Mrs. Florence Taft Eaton, of Concord, Massachusetts. Mrs. Eaton is an enthusiastic and skillful amateur gardener, who has turned her first-hand knowledge of practical gardening to good account for readers of the House Beautiful and other periodicals, and now has condensed a great deal of experience in the raising of vegetables into the limits of twelve monthly calendar sheets of a liberal size. Photographs serve admirably for their illustration. For Miss Patch’s Bird Stories, nothing else could have been so good as the pen-and-ink drawings by Mr. Robert J. Sim, with which the book is profusely adorned.

Though a well-behaved Christmas comes but once a year, ‘Christmas Eve on Beacon Hill’— to judge from our experience with a little pamphlet bearing that title — is a perennial institution. The steady demand for it as a token of remembrance led us before last Christmas to produce three other so-called ‘Christmas Prints,’ to which the public has been hospitable — most of all to a little rendering of St. Francis of Assisi’s ‘Sermon to the Birds,’ with colored designs after Maurice Denis. These have been followed by two general ‘Greeting Cards,’with lines of Shakespeare printed on reproductions of decorative panels by the seventeenth-century Italian engraver, Stefano Della Bella, and by two leaflets reproducing unfamiliar designs of Albrecht Dürer with an old English carol, ’The Seven Joys of Mary,’ and an ‘Ascension’ of Fra Angelico, with stanzas of Henry Vaughan.

Il is clear that the Atlantic circle contains many lovers of just such good things as the names that have been mentioned infallibly suggest.

One of the authors on our book-list, Miss Catherine T. Bryce, has the distinction of being the only woman member of the faculty at Yale University. But she won her reputation before she went to New Haven through notable work as teacher and supervisor in Eastern and MidWestern cities, and, more recently, in the field of pageantry.

The most striking feature of the Cleveland meeting of the National Education Association a year ago was Miss Bryce’s pageant, The Light. This we had published just previous to that notable presentation. The deep interest it aroused created a demand which has exhausted the first edition. We are accordingly republishing it in a new and enlarged form, in the belief that it will now have even a wider and stronger appeal. The text has not been changed, but the value of the second edition is significantly increased by Miss Bryce’s directions for producing the pageant. and by the photographs that were taken to commemorate the first performance.

The pageant has since carried far and wide its message that liberal public support of education is the truest economy for the community.

The title, Atlantic Usage, under which we have been announcing a book by Mr. George B. Ives, of this office, has been changed to Type, Text, and Style, with the sub-title, ‘A Compendium of Atlantic Usage.’ This, we believe, defines the book at once more accurately and more broadly. Its appeal is by no means confined to editors and printers, through whose hands it is passing as these words are written. We hope to publish it before the end of May.