Atlantic Shop-Talk

The Man of One Book

As Christmas approaches a Christmas tale of other years comes to mind.

‘What shall I give Jonas for Christmas?’

‘Give him a book.’

‘No, Jonas has a book.’

Yet not everybody is named Jonas, and even he may have outgrown the homo unius libri stage. If he is to make any oretense of keeping up with the output of American publishers, he must do more than that. The lists are formidable beyond belief this year: witness the ‘Fall Announcement Number’ of the Publishers’ Weekly, or, forsooth, the advertising pages of the Atlantic. In spite of the fact that Americans are statistically reported to fall far behind the inhabitants of other lands notably Switzerland and Belgium — in per capita consumption of books, the publishers are not pursuing their trade for the mere fun of it — and Jonas (like the story about him) must be passing out of date.

A Book Review

Even Shop-Talker must talk his own shop, and in the days before Christmas, if his shop be a publishing house, he naturally turns to the autumn books which represent the flowering of schemes planted in the spring — or several springs — before. He naturally wants to promote their fortunes, to say the word upon which he will look back a year later, and ask, ‘Was this the Blurb that launched a thousand Sales?’

He would be meditating such a word at this moment with respect to an Atlantic book. Memories of a Hostess, of which he has spoken before, but that a notice of it appears in the ‘Atlantic’s Bookshelf,’ a piece of furniture which adorns the portico of the magazine. At this rear entrance, or exit, it is only to be said that in the later years of the life of Mrs. Fields, a warm friendship sprang up between her and Miss Cather, then a young Western writer occupying an editorial position on McClure’s Magazine. Looking out upon the world from quite different angles of time and place, the older and the younger woman entered into a relation of the closest sympathy. The faith of Mrs. Fields in Miss Cather’s future as a writer was characteristic of her. Its justification, in which she would have taken a keen pleasure, is found in the place Miss Cather’s novels have taken among the foremost pieces of American fiction produced in recent years.

To return for a moment to Mr. Howe’s book itself — a welcome item of news about it is that it appears in a newspaper list of ‘best sellers’ in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as ‘Memories of a Hostess, by M. A. DeWolfe Hopper.’

Following Them Home

As books disappear from the stalls of the bookshops, carried off under a buyer’s arm or wrapped in corrugated paper and dispatched by parcel post, it is beguiling to speculate upon what becomes of them. Who is the ultimate consumer? Where will he sit down and turn the pages? In what mood, with what preconceptions and predilections will she — place aux dames! — savor the viands of mind and spirit compressed into a given combination of paper, ink, and binding?

It is comparatively easy to follow such books as David the Dreamer and The Boy Who Lived in Pudding Lane to their destinations. There, on Christmas morning, we may fairly expect to see Mr. Ralph Bergengren and Miss Sarah Addington face to face with one child after another. It will be an enviable experience on both sides. The Atlantic ‘Christmas Booklets’ for this year— The Holy Night, by Miss Florence Converse,Fiddle-Faddle Customs and Christmas Gambols, from an Old Text, 1740, and the illustrated reprint of Irving’s Christmas at Bracebridge Hall — may also be followed without difficulty, for the mailbox, the postman, and the Christmas mail, which bring us all certain ‘cards’ for which there is a familiar welcome.

How about ‘The Ladies!’— that collection of tales of memorable beauties and bas bleus, chiefly of the eighteenth century, which E. Barrington and the Atlantic Monthly Press have conspired to make into a book with a charm of its own? Will it find its way more frequently into feminine or masculine hands? We do not know. The reviewers provide no clue, for even to them the author appears indiscriminately as E. Barrington, himself and herself. It is violating no confidence to describe this author as an accomplished Canadian writer.

As for Steel: The Diary of a FurnaceWorker, the obvious destination of this first book by Charles Rumford Walker, an assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, is multiform. The student of social conditions and industry in America, the lover of authentic narratives of personal experience not often encountered by those who can treat it as the material from which literature is made, the friend of youth in its newest adventures in industrial America — all these (and their name is legion) will ultimately be found with a copy of Steel in their hands.

In this whole matter of destinations the publication of Colonel Theodore Lyman’s Civil War letters under the title Meade’s Headquarters, 1863-65, edited by Colonel Lyman’s nephew. George R. Agassiz, will determine a point that should be settled. Has the number of readers with a vivid interest in the Civil War been materially diminished by the World War? Here is one of the best of Civil War books, a really illuminating collection of letters reflecting the daily life of a highly intelligent and observant officer attached to General Meade’s staff. It will soon be known whether the substantial audience to which books of this type appeal is still on the alert. We expect an affirmative answer.

The readers of The Next-To-NothingHouse, by Alice Van Leer Carrick, can be visualized at once. What man or woman, with a drop of the ‘ antiquer’s’ blood, does not love a bargain and the story of it? Mrs. Carrick is an inveterate bargain seeker and finder. She has furnished her house at Hanover, New Hampshire, the cottage in which Daniel Webster lived when he was a student at Dartmouth, with the spoils of her quest. What is more, she has pictured them all in this sequel to her Collector’s Luck both in words and with illustrations. The result is a fascinating sequel to her successful book of several years ago, Collector’s Luck.

The only objection to the title of The Next-to-Nothing House is reported —by the way — to come from the occupants of the Dartmouth fraternity house next door to Mrs. Carrick’s cottage.

The Christmas Stocking

It would be, indeed, a slender Christmas stocking which could not accommodate The Notion-Counter, a small volume of sprightly essays by Nobody, published last spring by the Atlantic Monthly Press. This book has already made so many friends that we are confident of its making many more. One of its readers has recently written: ‘Day by day, in every way, I am growing gayer and gayer — but “Nobody” is to blame for that!’

The two latest nature books on the Atlantic list, Wild Brother, by William Lyman Underwood, and Wild Folk, by Samuel Scoville, Jr., help one to get out-of-doors, even in midwinter, and before January begins it will be strange if many new adventurers into the fields of nature do not find themselves setting forth under the skilled guidance of Mr. Underwood and Mr. Scoville.

Another Holiday Thought

The readers of the Living Age, one of the magazines which proceed from the Atlantic office, are heard on many sides to express themselves as being in the company of those who have found the thing they are looking for. This is good news to the editor and publishers of the periodical, for they are strongly of the opinion that the very thing which thoughtful Americans should be looking for at this time is a faithful, humanized reflection of world affairs. Just now, however, we like to think of the pleasure of Living Age readers in feeling that they are on a sort of inside track. It is a pleasure which might be widely extended by making a subscription to the magazine a present to men and women who really want to know what is going on in the wider world of thought and action.