The Atlantic Bookshelf: Conclusion

ACTIONS, SO runs the old copybook maxim, ‘speak louder than words.’ The commercial possibilities of this home truth were recognized seventy-five years ago when Leslie’s Weekly, with its staff of woodcut artists, began to record the Civil War in pictures rather than prose. In those very years an independent by the name of Brady was driving his hooded wagon from one battle- field to another making photographic plates whose perfection was not to be discovered till the new century. With the development of the camera, pictures began to encroach more and more in a province previously reserved for literature. The illustrated magazines gradually replaced all but the hardiest perennials in text; newspapers found that it paid to have graphic sections; books appeared consisting almost wholly of pictures. Not only did these illustrations point up whatever text remained; for the new democracy ot readers they proved much easier reading than the prose they replaced. Thus certain prophets were heard to say that the radio, the camera, and their child, television, would one day replace books altogether. God forbid.

The American Procession and The First World War are recent and successful additions to the shelf of picture books. More ambitious in its scope, if less striking in its detail, is the latest production of Simon and Schuster, Eyes on the World, a photographic record of 1934-1935 which has been edited by M. Lincoln Schuster.

]f it be true that ‘one picture is worth a thousand words,’ then we have here a volume of contemporary history, a volume three times as assertive as Mr. Allen’s Only Yesterday, But I am not sure that I can accept this logic at its face value. Suppose we weigh this picture book in the balance. What we see is a pictorial chronicle of seventeen consecutive months. The pictures have been placed in admirable order; they carry a most depressing punch that hits you again and again between the eyes. Their story gives evidence that it is a man-made world in which we are living, that women must be either submissive or alluring, that threats, persecution, and violence flourish on any soil (the portrait of the Chinese children is almost impossible to forget), that economic problems distract our minds from all other considerations, and that cartoonists are the best satirists in the modern world.

On the negative side it may be objected that no history which goes to extremes, no history which | takes its titles from newspaper headlines, can be wholly accurate; that the quiet integrity with which life goes on does not lend itself easily to the camera; that little or no effort has been made to visualize the good humor and the gentler emotions which keep most of us in action; that there is no serious reference to the religious force of today, and that the references to science and to art are so slight as to appear condescending. You pays your money — and $3.75 is rather a large sum to-day — and you takes your choice.