Sentimental Bundle

WILL You MARRY ME?--Edifed by Helena Scheu-Riesz--Island Workshop Press ($ 1.50).

Jacketed in speckled Biedermeier wallpaper, Will You Many Me? is a little bundle of letters of proposal rifled from the dim attic of the past. It makes a sentimental hour's reading less jumbled and so more satisfying than M. Lincoln Schuster's recent 563-page Treasury of the World's Great Letters. Editor Frau Scheu-Riesz groups her letters according to the architectural styles of their periods (Baroque, Rococo, Colonial, etc.) which she thinks they mirror. Scraps from the bundle:

Essayist Richard Steele to Mary Scurlock (1707): ". . . You must give me either a fan, a mask or a glove you have worn, or I cannot live. . . ." Biographer James Boswell to Isabella de Zuylen (1764): "You have fine talents of one kind; but are you deficient in others? Do you think your reason is as distinguished as your imagination? Believe me, Zelide, it is not. Believe me and endeavor to improve. . . ." (She rejected him.) Field Marshal Gebhard von Bliicher to one Frau von S. (1795): "I can't enter upon any marriage which does not make provision for my old age and for the welfare of my children. ... I am aware, dear lady, that you are the possessor of a considerable income. . . ." The Duke of Sussex, son of George III, to Lady Augusta Murray (1820): ". . . By all that is holy, till I am married I will eat nothing."

Frau Helene Scheu-Riesz (pronounced Shoy-Reese) began her literary career in Vienna, age 18, with translations of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She also wrote a novel, Der Revolutionaer, which came out spang during the 1918 revolution, had quite a succes d'estime. The Scheu-Rieszes have long mixed politics and publishing. Her husband, who died before the Anschluss, published some 200 children's books from different languages in an effort to broaden the viewpoint of Viennese primary school children, who were using "dreadfully nationalistic" primers. In off hours Frau Scheu-Riesz organized a kind of socialist salon where she mixed left social democrats, right social democrats, reformers, Communists and Nazis. Most of her guests have since "gone to camp," as she puts it--concentration camp, of course.

Frau Scheu-Riesz came to the U. S. in 1936, began organizing the Island Workshop Press Cooperative last summer. It is composed of people who spend July and August "cooperating" on Ocracoke Island, N. C. One is a Cherokee Indian chief. An other is Blanche C. Weill, whose Through Children's Eyes, "the story of the 'naughty' child and the timid child, told by themselves," was published the same day as Will You Marry Me? A newer cooperator is Robert Haven Schauffler, author of a standard life of Beethoven. The cooperative offers courses in art, literature, creative writing, radio-script writing, Indian crafts, life saving. Through Children's Eyes and Will You Marry Me? are its first publishing venture.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.