Bibliophile*

Bookworm Newton Has Good Capacity, Good Digestion The epistle dedicatory of these essays is addressed to the founder of a little club of wilful men who came together fortnightly 40 years ago in Philadelphia to rub wits and read papers on the lives, times, works, and in the manner, of worthy men of English letters. Author Newton declares that the meetings were a liberal education; and since he further declares this education was the only one he ever received, the reader can but think what a singularly fine little club that fine little club must have been.

For Author Newton turned out to be a bookworm of astonishing capacity and superlative digestion, with a most charming literary style of his own to impart the gusto of his protracted feasts. He fell not only to voracious reading, but also to the deeper vice of collecting books for the rarity and beauty of their colophons, the nicety of their printing and margins, the occasions and associations of their appearance in book history, the inscriptions and old bookplates to be discovered in them and the lively diversion of nosing out rare editions in the bookstalls of two continents and a pair of foggy islands.

His friends knew that he made a practice of writing privately about his finds and adventures, and unbeknownst to him arranged for the publication of The Amenities of Book Collecting (1918), rapidly multiplying editions of which soon established him as an essayist of rank and led to A Magnificent Farce, Dr. Johnson: A Play, and the present volume.

Mr. Newton is master of a conversational mode of address that would have delighted his learned and loquacious hero, Dr. Samuel Johnson. His discourse upon the typographical history of the Bible is no more pedantic than his bubbling monolog on Gilbert and Sullivan (in which it occurs to him that "we get lots of our ideas of government from comic operas and then take ourselves as seriously as Sitting Bull"). From "The Ghost of Gough Street" and "Shakespeare and the Old Vic" one gets a faintly disturbing impression of anglomania, soon dispelled by the mordant judgments of "Are Comparisons Odious?" (on English lecturers and tailors, French politeness and libraries, American politicians and platitudes) and the warm enthusiasm of "Change Cars at Paoli"/- (on historic spots near

Philadelphia, notably the Washington Memorial Chapel at Valley Forge).

There is a galloping chapter on "Sporting Books." "Skinner Street News" touches on the Godwin-Wollstonecraft-Shelley group. Dickensians will relish "The Greatest Little Book in the World." But a particular interest is unnecessary for lively enjoyment of any of these papers; the wide knowledge they reflect is so unassuming, so humanized, so colored by the author's manifold personality.

The Author. "Alfred Edward Newton was born in Philadelphia more years ago than he cares to remember; his weight is a matter of confidence." He ran away from school to work for Cyrus Hermann Kotschmar Curtis when that famed publisher was starting the Ladies' Home Journal, and entered business for himself at 20. He knew nothing then of electricity, "knows less today," yet is now president of a large concern making electrical apparatus (Cutter Electric & Manufacturing Co.) by reason of a genius for not interfering with men trained to their jobs. "He smokes incessantly, has no love for automobiles, regards a screwdriver with suspicion and a monkey-wrench with horror." Modest, he will permit no one to address him as "Doctor," though his abiding passion for English literature has caused three universities to confer upon him honorary degrees.

Lucky Boy

DAVID GOES VOYAGING--David Binney Putnam--Putnam ($1.50). Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were "made-up" boys. David Putnam is a real one, aged 12, and besides he went thousands of miles on the ocean (with Deep-Sea-Explorer William Beebe, to Panama and the Galapagos Island) and had a lot of modern tackle and interested grown-ups to fish with and collect birds' eggs, turtles, lizards, bugs, beetles and even scorpions. He saw sharks and devilfish, albatrosses and penguins, sea lions and octopuses. He helped dig buried treasure and played pirate on desert islands at the Equator. His mother was with him but she is a great sport and didn't "worry." She caught even bigger fish than he did. She helped him write this book, which won't make any one jealous, because he tells it all very calmly, like a scientist, and doesn't rub it in how lucky he was to go to school at sea last winter.

Last Lowell

WHAT'S O' CLOCK--Amy Lowell-- Houghton Mifflin ($2.25). These are the last poems that a very sensitive and intelligent lady wrote, most of them while she sat in her garden or study between arduous hours compiling a ponderous life of Poet John Keats (TIME, Mar. 2). As she was alone most of the time, her poems usually drifted like brilliant toy balloons, or crackled like showering sparks, out of her pure ego. Three hours she spent once, imagining, chaffing, quizzing, loving three "sister poets"--Sappho, "Ba" Browning, Emily Dickinson. When the purple grackles spent a day of their southerning in her evergreens, she took them personally, sadly. She wrote of lilacs, passionate to identify herself once more with her old New England.

A lady dainty as a bird for all her bulk, she sometimes wrote in a Japanese measure, light as a moth's wing, of love's pain. She contrived a grotesque, flitting tragedy from the conceited dreams of a scrimp-shanked philosopher, starving himself dead in the dusty ratruns of a cathedral spire.

One day, sitting quietly, she wrote this:

And Death with her silver-slippered feet, Do you hear her walk by your

garden-chair ? The cool of her hand makes a

tempered heat, That's all, and the shadow of her

hair Is curiously sweet.

Eel Pie

DULCARNON--Henry Milner Rideout -- Duffield ($1.50). With devious dithering that confuses yet never quite discourages the attention, a mystery is hitched along from Marseilles to Port Said, to Calcutta, to a native prison in the hills, to a river village, to a maharajah's time-encrusted palace in the jungle. Cryptic scribbling in mouldy volumes of Chaucer lead at last to--certain mislaid belongings of the globe-sacking son of Philip of Macedon. Utterly fantastic and gratuitous mystification, with a U. S. adventurer and a rather attractive French wandering man moving in a maze of blind beggars, green lizards, bearded ladies, dengue fever, betel-chewing babus and--most resembling the structure of the book--live eel pie.

*THE GREATEST BOOK IN THE WORLD, and other Papers--A. Edward Newton--Atlantic Monthly Press (55.00).

/-Pennsylvania R. R. junction; named (after its tavern) for Pasquale Paoli, "Liberator of Corsica"-