Books in Black or Red

by Edmund Lester Pearson. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1923. 8vo. xii+213 pp. $3.50.

THE author, who is editor of publications in the New York Public Library, has long been known by readers of weekly and daily journals as an informing and — what is rarer — amusing writer on ‘books in general.’ Twelve of his essays he has collected here, and they present, sufficient variety of topic for readers of all tastes.

Readers who, like Mr. Pearson, were born in 1880 or thereabouts, will find his book particularly appealing; for one would have to have been a child in the eighteen-eighties fully to enter into some of his enthusiasms. The essay, ‘Wizards and Enchanters,’ for example, deals mostly with the early volumes of St. Nicholas, and the work of artists like J. G. Francis and A. B. Frost and stories like The Floating Prince, Tinkham Brothers’ Tide Mill, and, best of all, Davy and the Goblin. Can any man who as a boy read these stories in monthly parts and pored over the pictures help being sentimental about them? Or can any such man fail to chuckle contentedly over the contrast presented in ‘The Cary Girls’ (not Alice and Phœbe, but Hattie and Ellen), between a neighborhood library of the eighteen-eighties and ‘The Purple Pagan,’ a radical bookshop of 1923? Or, finally, can anyone who as a boy sat behind the barn or lay on the roof of a shed and read Double Van the Dastard, or the Pirates of the Pecos, and Deadwood Dick on Deck, or Calamity Jane, the Heroine of Whoop Up, and other classics of the period, fail to grow enthusiastic over the essay, ‘With, Ho! Such Bugs and Goblins!’ which is a manly defense of the dime novel.

It is comforting, also, to find that the author is brazenly fond of mystery stories, especially those that deal with murders of a pleasant intricacy. I am grateful for his list of some particularly good ones that I have not read. The two essays, on literary hoaxes are full of curious information, of which the account of Mr. Pearson’s own innocent deception. The Old Librarian’s Almanac, is the freshest. And we must not forget the two excellent little stories, ‘The Bird’ and ‘The Lost First Folio’ — the one about a parrot who looked like Deacon Pettingill, who took up the collection in the First Unitarian Church, and the other about Agamemnon Jackson, a book-collector, who just missed owning the first folio of Shakespeare; or the two long articles on the search for curious books, which are a kind of omnibus bill of everything bookish not included elsewhere in the book.

‘There must be a lot of poor birds,’ says an anonymous speaker in the Preface, ‘who cannot buy rarities at hundreds of dollars apiece, but like to acquire books at seventy-five cents or a dollar or three. These fellows might like a book written expressly for them.’ Books in Blackor Red is at least the beginning of such a compilation.

R. M. GAY.