Books: The Editors Like

BY ARTHUR FOFF (HARCOURT, BRACE, $3.50)

A batty beauty and the patient newspaperman who tries to straighten her out are the principals in this story of disastrous love. The setting is San Francisco; the writing is exceptionally good, fast, and witty.

BY CLYDE BRION DAVIS (LIPPINCOTT, $3.50)

Mr. Davis, unpredictable but always interesting, begins with political mischief in a small Western town and works up to a fairly cosmic ethical debate, dramatized in deliberately fantastic terms.

BY JUAN RAMóN JIMÉNEZ, translated by Eloise Roach! (UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, $3.75)

An early and not wholly characteristic work of the 1956 Nobel Prize winner, these very short sketches of life in a small Spanish town have a lyric charm which survives the resistance of English to prose poetry surprisingly well.

BY WILLIAM GOLDING (HARCOURT, BRACE, $3.75)

The author undertakes to make a formidable allegory out of the attempts of a small-time theatrical rascal to survive on a barren rock in the middle of the Atlantic.

BY HAROLD NICOLSON (DOUBLEDAY, $5.00)

The great French literary critic was one of the dreariest eccentrics who ever took to the pen, and his biographer has performed a great feat in making the uneventful life of this dismal fellow into a most entertaining book.

BY DAVID MAGARSHACK (CROVE, $6.50)

Much information about nineteenth-century Russia is included in Mr. Magarshack’s scholarly life of the dour but influential author of Dead Souls.

The Shakespearean Ciphers ExaminedBY WILLIAM F. AND ELIZABETH S. FRIEDMAN (CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, $5.00)

Colonel and Mrs. Friedman, professional cryptographers, have great fun with the rich and strange characters who have unearthed coded messages in Shakespeare’s plays, even while they demolish the alleged codes.

(FARRAR, STRAUS & CUDAHY, $4.75)

A thoroughgoing report of an astounding legal tussle in Victorian England. Mr. Woodruff is rather fond of the Australian thug who nearly succeeded in passing himself off as a missing baronet, and enjoys the faint possibility that the claimant was what he said he was.