The Atlantic Bookshelf: A Guide to Good Books

LADIES and GENTLEMEN: At this our first meeting I must endeavor to put my best foot forward. Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking (cries of ‘No! no!’ ) I have yet been led to believe that there is need to-day of a personal as well as a formal approach to books. This autumn alone 5000 new titles have been published (groans). But which are to be tasted, which chewed, and which digested, who that must earn a living can tell? Your professional critics, your book clubs, your blurb writers, all cry their favorites, but the hot cakes come so fast and the ballyhoo is so furious that the reader grows suspicious and goes empty to bed.

To cocktail your appetite and to help you find what you want to read is my undertaking (loud cheers - and one catcall). By supplementing the searching reviews of Atlantic critics with free and I hope entertaining speech (‘Hear! hear!’) about titles, blurbs, type and binding, translations, authors’ and publishers’ idiosyncrasies, including my own, — in fact, any morsel that might have some juice in it, - we shall try to dish up contemporary literature in a way to attract both producer and consumer. Try a little (laughter).

It will be our first purpose to select for our leading criticism a book, whether fiction or non-fiction. which we take to be distinctive— a book which you can sink your teeth in, one worth being discussed at length. Such a book, for instance, as Marriage and Morals, by the Honorable Bertrand Russell. At the suggestion of his publishers, Mr. Russell has expressed his opinions on what is probably the most provocative subject in the human mind. Since opinion is largely the result of one’s experience, it may be pertinent to sketch very briefly the author’s career.

Son of the late Viscount Amberley, grandson of Lord John Russell, the Honorable Bertrand Russell was orphaned at the age of four.

Heir to the second Earl Russell, he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a Scholar, Fellow, and Lecturer. He took a First Class in Mathematics and Moral Sciences.

The author of twenty-three works, he is internationally known as a philosopher and writer of brilliance.

Wedded again after a divorce in 1921, Mr. Russell is the father of a son and a daughter by his second marriage.

His brother. Earl Russell, is reported to be an agnostic and a Fabian. He has been married three times and is the author of Lay Sermons, Divorce, and an autobiography.