Times Topicker

"The thing which in the subway is called congestion is highly esteemed in the night spots as intimacy." P: "A cool statistical outline of what America had to offer . . . would never have filled the emigrant ships. A rainbow was needed--a land where the roads were paved with gold, where every man was as good as everybody else, where every man's native-born son had a fine chance to be elected President. No colonization without misrepresentation."

These observations appeared last week in a provocative new book about New York titled No Mean City (Dutton; $3). Though the name of its author, Simeon Strunsky, is reasonably familiar (he has written nine previous books), the man himself is one of the nation's least-known big-time journalists. Rare indeed is the New York Times reader who knows that Simeon Strunsky is the anonymous writer of the paper's witty, erudite editorial-page column, "Topics of the Times:"

Bald, icy-eyed Columnist Strunsky is the kind of newspaperman about whom no hit play or best-selling novel is likely to be written. He has never picked a lovenest lock, swiped a picture from a new widow, or solved a murder. Born in Russia and schooled in New York City from P.S. 77 through Columbia, he went to work as an editor of the New International Encyclopedia in 1900, aged 21. After six years he shifted to editorial writing for the New York Post, became its editor in 1920, moved on to the Times in 1924.

Even to most Timesmen, Strunsky is little known. He inhabits a paneled office on the Times building's hushed, neo-Gothic tenth floor, sacred to editorial writers and the library, and referred to by reporters in the bustling city room on the third floor as "Heaven." He summers in New Canaan, Conn., winters on Fifth Avenue, lives almost wholly for his work.

Strunsky's column shows many a mark of his early training as an encyclopedist. Unlike the big "name" columnists, he approaches his job as some leisurely, penetrating small-town editors do, with no particular regard for column continuity. In seven columns last week, for example, he discussed the teaching of American history, John Hancock, nationalism, the value of keeping a diary, Ethan Allen, U.S. foreign policy, the liberation of France, colored book bindings, Jay Gould, feuding in Washington agencies, soap operas, the absence of advertising in French newspapers, George Washington, Russ Columbo's mother, pronunciations, Nazi fanatics, the League of Nations, the 1920s and the "We Won the War" legend.

His polished paragraphs are packed with learning, but always readable, full of neat, humorous turns of phrase and thought.' He is easily the stodgy Times's most graceful stylist.

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