THE Modern Library, the most vigorous bookshelf of reading that is published to-day, has announced its new titles for the next six months. Glancing over the list, I made special note of Sanctuary, by William Faulkner, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Hardy, Victory, by Joseph Conrad, a selection of Chekhovs Short Stories, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, eight Elizabethan Flays, and Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. It is this periodic injection of the best new — and old — blood that keeps the Library so much in circulation. This, and the fact that titles losing their appeal are dropped from the list as soon as their yearly sales begin to decline below 2000 copies. Here, for instance, are some of the reprints that have been withdrawn — Stevenson’s Treasure Island, In a Winter City, by Ouida, Kipling’s Soldiers Three, The Child of Pleasure, by D’Annunzio, The Woman Question, by Havelock Ellis.... A group of Upton Sinclair enthusiasts have embarked on a campaign to induce the Swedish Academy to award the Nobel prize in literature to the Californian. It has been persistently rumored that his name came up for some consideration at the time of the last award. Were there a separate prize for pamphleteering, Sinclair would come second only to H. G. Wells. . . . Four of the six novels Hugh Walpole most enjoyed in 1931 were well received in the United States. They were Hatter’s Castle, by A. J. Cronin; Juan in America, by Eric Linklater; Finch’s Fortune, by Mazo de la Roche; and The Grasshoppers Come, by David Garnett. . . .
A Sunday book-review section did not want to release the Literary Guild from a back-cover reservation. ’We don’t want to run it,’ said the Guild’s advertising manager. But the paper insisted that the obligation be fulfilled. When, however, the advertising copy was delivered, the paper took one look and then released the Guild from its promise. The copy read ‘Compliments of A Friend.’
