This Book-Collecting Game
by . Boston: Little, Brown & Co. (An Atlantic Monthly Press Publication.) 1928. 8vo. xiv + 410 pp. Illus. $5.00.
IF we may draw an inference from the close of his new and fourth book, this is Mr. Newton’s Swan Song to the collectorate. Perhaps this is just as well: I do not say so because the stream has run out, but because I do not think he will better what he has already accomplished. Mr. Newton’s writing, his books, his point of view, are not easy to criticize. He is a unique person: a hobbyist, a man of taste, a Johnsonian, an artist, a reader at once catholic and intolerant, an individual impudent yet rather lovable.
If his other books have been aimed at the reader who might stroll through his pages in the manner of a visitor in the Tate Gallery, This Book-Collecting Game is addressed in all intimacy to the prospective, or the actual, novitiate in the art. Mr. Newton is no stylist. He would be the first to say so. He does not even pretend. He is the talker: fluent, exciting, a little overfond of anecdote, perhaps, a little repetitious, extremely prejudicial. But this is nothing. If one cares for books ’in black or red’ one will be enchanted; and for him who has yet to make encounter, this is eminently the place to begin.
The way of the digressor is easy. Yet it is possible that digression is largely responsible for the charm of this book. Mr. Newton seems always to be surprised in the middle of an observation by collateral evidence. The chapters themselves surprise each other. There is that ‘Conversation in the Library at “Oak Knoll,”’ with a great deal to say about George Moore, and deriving, I should guess, from that extraordinary introduction to An Anthology of Pare Poetry. There is a pleasant sandwiching of sugared technicalities in such chapters as ’The Book Itself,’ and ‘The Format of the English Novel,’ a gentle irony over the tricks of the trade in ‘Caveat Emptor,’ and a loose rein on literary judgment in ‘One Hundred Good Novels.’ This matter of opinion on the qualities of writers living and dead may prove a source of irritation to the earnest. From a nature so positive, acceptance of Moby Dick, denial of Conrad, light tolerance of Emerson, are bound to strike fire and make one forget for the moment that this is not primarily of books but about them. I am surprised that Morley has not persuaded him to the faith of Walt Whitman. Or even more so that Tomlinson — who, he says, ‘ writes of the sea as no other man now living does’ — has not brought him to the knees of Thoreau!
The book is beautifully illustrated out of the author’s rich collection and from the collections of a legion of friends. I have said Mr. Newton is a unique man; I should add that he occupies a unique place in letters. Of the many followers in the path of Amenities none has equaled him. Book-collecting, he avers, is eating one’s cake and having it too. A delightful hobby that produced a delightful writer who has bought with princes and sold to the proletarians of the armchair.
DAVID MCCORD