John Donne, O. P.

Under the pavement of bomb-battered St. Paul's Cathedral this week, the skull & bones of ironic John Donne might have leaned backward with a lipless grin. After some 300 years, Ernest Hemingway's best-selling novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (whose title and magnificent motto are by John Donne), had made Preacher-Poet Donne a bestseller. U. S. customers could not buy a volume of Donne's works for love or money.

The bookstores had sold out completely. Consternated publishers, having dusted off and sold the 1,000-odd copies of Donne they usually keep on the top shelf, confessed that Best-Seller Donne was O.P.

(trade patter for out of print). They saw nothing funny about it. "It is," said Ben nett Cerf, publisher of Random House's $3.50 edition of Donne, "a distressing story." Almost as distressed was the Ox ford University Press, which publishes two editions of Donne's poetry, an edition of his prose.

The trouble is that John Donne (com plete) is not printed in the U. S. at all, but in England. Impatiently, the Oxford Press awaited a Donne shipment, praying that, like every other Oxford Press shipment so far, this one might elude Nazi submarines and planes.

Publisher Cerf had no such hopes. Smart Random House had caught on to the Donne boom as soon as it began, promptly ordered 1,500 sheets of its Nonesuch edition from England. Just as promptly the Nazis bombed them out of existence. Says Publisher Cerf: "I know for sure that no sheets of the Nonesuch Donne exist in England." Whether the plates also had been destroyed, he was not sore.

Temporarily, the dilemma, of Poet Donne, his publishers and readers resembled the one he once scratched on the wall of his Fleet Street Prison cell:--Anne Donne, John Donne, Undone.

* Where he was jailed for eloping with Anne More, a minor.

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