How to Send a 7-Year-Old Boy Through Oxford

Holiday’s editor recently had lunch with Joyce Cary, at the novelist’s home in Oxford. The discussion turned toward contemporary standards at Oxford, whether or not today’s students did as well as those of other days.

“Generally, yes,” said Mr. Cary. “There probably are more failures today, not because the level of intelligence is down, but because the habit of reading was not established early in life. Where books have been in the home, available to the child at a fairly early age—where reading has been possible—the student acquires a power of understanding and expression which is vital to success in any study or profession. It is by reading that children learn the. words for their own ideas.”

Exposure to good writing at an early age is a help through life as well as through Oxford, lit the United States today, some of the best writing is appearing in magazines, some of the very best in Holiday. And Holiday, because it is a combination of prose and pictures, provides a particularly happy way of weaning youngsters from the dangerous mental undernourishment of the Comic book, onto an invigorating diet of the English language, beautifully prepared and served.

A succulent sample is the June issue, now on the stands. In it you’ll find such writers as Ludwig Bemelmans, S. J. Perelman, Philip Van Horen Stern, Phil Stong and Joe McCarthy.