Atlantic Shop-Talk

IT is one of the compensations of a publisher’s existence that he is compelled to live a definite part of his life in the future—to proceed, as the lawyers say, munc pro tunc. On a hot day in June, for example, there is a certain cooling comfort in talking about ‘autumn books,’ with their inevitable suggestion of longer evenings and the first lightings of open fires. For it is in June — on a day suggesting the well-done far more clearly than the rare — that these words for midsummer publication are written.

Through the full title of A Magnificent Farce and Other Diversions of a Book-Collector, by A. Edward Newton, the relation between this new book and the author’s previous volume, The Amenities of Book-Collecting, will suggest itself to many minds. Mr. Newton put the final touches on his second book just before leaving Philadelphia for a summer vacation in France and England. His publishers in the Atlantic office are seeing the book through the press, and hope to have it ready for him, and the large audience he has created, by the time of his return in September.

The intensely personal, and therefore intensely human, quality of Mr. Newton’s Amenities explains its remarkable success. The same quality pervades A Magnificent Farce, for it is from the books which the author himself has brought together, from the associations that have sprung from the process, and, perhaps most notably of all, from the extraordinary collection of illustrative material in his own possession, that he has drawn both text and picture for his new book. Thus it becomes almost a record of friendships; for Mr. Newton is no less the friend of chosen spirits in the centuries that have gone than of those contemporaries of his own who stray engagingly across his pages. Warren Hastings, the central figure of the ‘Magnificent Farce,’ William Blake, Arnold Bennett, and Christopher Morley —to name but a few of Mr. Newton’s host of friendly figures—commingle without any more suggestion of the incongruous than Addison detected in the spectacle of Westminster Abbey making contemporaries of all those whose dust it shelters.

One of the best of John Jay Chapman’s books, his biography of William Lloyd Garrison, has been out of print for several years. A new edition of it will appear among the early autumn publications of the Atlantic Monthly Press. This will be differentiated from the original edition by means

of a new introduction, written in this year of 1921, and relating the significance of Garrison’s life and work to the present time. When the book first appeared, it was customary for American writers to speak of ‘the war’ with only one meaning, which instantly carried the reader’s mind more than half a century back into American history. The last few years have changed all that; but they have not changed the meaning of a spirit like Garrison’s, and Mr. Chapman’s burning portrait of one of the great, apostles of human freedom is as timely to-day, when material and spiritual realities have resumed their ancient warfare, as it ever was or ever can be.

In addition to its new introduction, the book will be equipped, in the revised edition, with a full chronology of the circumstances of Garrison’s life, with a resulting gain of practical usefulness for purposes of study. The body of the book, with its ardent spiritual message, is unchanged.

It is our own belief that not only the boys who have read The Mutineers, — and there are many of them, — but also a considerable number of fathers and older brothers — for many of these, besides, have been reading this tale of the sea — will rejoice to hear that Mr. Charles Boardman Hawes has written another story of the same general character. It is called The Great Quest, and has been making its serial appearance, like its predecessor, in The Open Road, with which Mr. Hawes himself is associated. Of course, he never went to sea on a Yankee vessel in the first or the fourth decade of the last century; but he has done the next best thing for a man with the story-teller’s gift: he has made a hobby of the study of old log-books and maritime narratives of many sorts, so that the nautical atmosphere in which his books move and have their being is authentic to quite a rare degree. One amusing evidence of this is that, when the meticulous proofreader questions an unfamiliar word in Mr. Hawes’s manuscript, he can not only retort with a confident Stet in the margin of the proof, but also fortify his position by chapter-and verse reference to the source of his strange term of the sea.

But no amount of authenticity could make a dull yarn readable. Mr. Hawes’s new story, The Great Quest, which deals with mad adventures on the West Coast of Africa, is anything but a dull yarn. In fact, we believe it marks a distinct advance in Mr. Hawes’s capacity as a story-teller.

How that capacity has impressed an adult reader of his first book may be seen in a letter written by Professor Dallas Lore Sharp, of Boston University, after making the acquaintance of The Mutineers several months ago: ’I have read Mr. Hawes’s Mutineers till the finger of scorn was pointed at me! “ A man grown,” they cried, “ readingas bays’ book and keeping it from the children!” But I got started first. What could I do? It. is real boys’ stuff, and a right good story. I am glad such themes have not been lost yet to boys and men! ’

Mr. Hawes, by the way, is one of the younger graduates of Bowdoin College, His wife, a true helpmeet in all his work, is a daughter of Mr. George W. Cable.

The name of Miss Nancy Byrd Turner, a Virginian writer who for several years has been editor of the ‘Children’s Page’ in the Youth’s Companion, has long been familiar to those who care for the better sort of American verse, whether for younger or older readers. Her poems — the word is used advisedly — have appeared in many magazines, but never, up to the present time, in a book of her own. Such a book will be issued in September by the Atlantic Monthly Press, under the title, Zodiac Town.

It is a book that children may be counted upon to like, both for its verses and for the prose that binds them together. The children need not be told, but their elders may be interested to know that, when the verses which form a large part of this volume first came to the Atlantic office, they came, with many more, as detached bits of rhyme bearing no obvious relation to one another. Their charm and cleverness led to a suggestion to Miss Turner that, if she could devise some way to weld a portion of them into a coherent whole, a book might be the result. This she achieved through the invention of the story-scheme of Zodiac. Town and the production of the new verses and the prose which constitute the frame-work of the narrative. It was a piece of literary craftsmanship so deftly wrought that we cannot help believing this knowledge of it will enhance the interest or die nook for all who care for feats of literary skill. If we did not believe it to be an uncommonly successful feat, of course we should say nothing about it.

The pictures in Zodiac Town must have a word of their own. They are the first American work of a young English artist, Miss Winifred Bromhall, who came to Boston from London less than a year ago, and is now curator of the Children’s Art Centre at the South End Music School in Boston. If ever author and illustrator were qualified by experience and sympathy to appeal directly to the young, Miss Turner and Miss Bromhall possess these qualifications.

The Seven Ages of Man, by Ralph Bergengren, scheduled for September publication, will be the fourth book by this author to appear on the list of the Atlantic Monthly Press. The list is still young, and no other author is represented upon it by so many titles. His Jane, Joseph, and John, an illustrated book of verses for children, and his little volume of essays, The Comforts of Home, appeared in 1918. These were followed, in 1919, by a second volume of brief essays, The Perfect Gentleman. The new book is a collection of characteristically whimsical papers, akin to The Comforts of Home and The Perfect Gentleman in manner, but more a unit than either of these volumes in point of substance, and in its presentation of a shrewd and humorous philosophy of life. Mr. Bergengren cultivates this philosophy the year round at Scituate, just far enough from Boston to keep out of the turmoil of a city, yet not too far to cast a philosopher’s eye upon the ways of huddled human society when there is any danger of forgetting what it is like.

All these, and one more, Inside the House Beautiful, a companion volume to What Makes the House Beautiful, by Henrietta C. Peabody, are September books. It is a little premature to begin talking now about our October books, but surely it is permissible to remark that next month we shall have something to say about the Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson by Professor Bliss Perry, of Harvard University; a delightful little book of verses, Many Children, by Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer, with illustrations by Florence Wyman Ivins, the strangest of true stories of a bear, profusely illustrated with striking photographs, by William Lyman Underwood, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and a reprint of the Christmas classic, The Visit of St. Nicholas, from designs by Mr. Bruce Rogers, who is now associated with the Press of William Edwin Rudge, in Mount Vernon, New York.

Of all these matters, more anon. We have been holding our peace about them so long that it is safer to clear the throat in this manner before beginning to talk a month hence.

A word was said here in June about a new educational text, Youth and the New World, edited by Ralph P. Boas, which the Atlantic Monthly Press is adding to its list. This word must have failed to reach a potential editor in one of the State Universities, for he has recently proposed a compilation of Atlantic articles dealing with education, science, polities, industry, religion, and the position of women in the modern world. Is it not a good omen for a new book when a second editor wants to produce something else exactly like it?