Alice was back in the bosom of Dr. Abraham S. W. Rosenbach. The rare-book man who in 1928 paid more than $75,000 for the Wonderland manuscript (and then sold it) got it back at a Manhattan auction for $50,000. No reflection on Alice: her adventures sold like nylons.

Somerset Maugham put his much-sought-after Of Human Bondage manuscript out of the reach of dealers. As a gesture of Anglo-American friendliness he gave it to the Library of Congress.

Franklin D. Roosevelt's stamps brought a total of $210,875--nearly thrice their assessed value. Probable estate tax for his heirs: 35-50% of the proceeds.

Charles A. Lindbergh snapped up a rarity of a sort in Darien, Conn.--a home. Cost: $82,500.

Fancy Dress

Grace Coolidge, 67, relict of the 29th President, contributed a good-as-new White House evening gown to the Edwards Congregational Church of Northampton, Mass. Whatever it brings at auction will help pay for the church's new offices, kitchenette, cloakroom and powder room. The gown, circa 1928: white satin with applique velvet flowers (pink, blue, and lavender) and a double train.*

Will Rogers Jr., about to impersonate his late, lariat-twirling father for the cinema and run for the U.S. Senate to boot, got into cinemappropriate costume, struck a pose, attempted in vain his father's famed, lopsided grin (see cut).

Shirley Temple, bride of seven months, firmly refused a fan who had dewily told the world that she wanted to borrow Shirley's wedding gown for her own marriage. "Some things," declared Shirley, "have to remain personal and sentimental."

Aneurin Bevan, British Minister of Health, approached the ultimate in good sportsmanship when he obliged photographers at a Modern Homes exhibition in London--seized an electric iron and manfully went to work on a darling little blouse on a sleeve-board (see cut).

The Duchess of Windsor, settling herself for summer on the Riviera, gladdened the heart of another Paris couturier. Her buys from Hermes included swimsuits, playsuits, beach pajamas, dresses, coats, and an ensemble girdled with an embroidered belt announcing simply: Wallis.

Liquefaction

Jim Corbett (no kin), tiger-hunter-turned-best-seller (Man Eaters of Kumaon; TIME, April 8), missed a Manhattan party in his honor. Corbett failed to get a plane reservation from India, but the Oxford University Press happily greeted two other cocktail guests that made it by private plane from Florida. They were twelve-week-old tiger cubs, and the assembled critics scared the daylights out of them.

Sinclair ("Red") Lewis, ramshackle, plain-spoken satirist of Americana, was in solid: chic and glittery Town & Country's usual snapshots of the well-dressed at cocktails had him right in there among the Newport Vanderbilts and the Oyster Bay Roosevelts.

Ernest Hemingway's own drink recipe was about to be made available to the man in the street. A re-issue of The Gentleman's Companion, an out-of-print $15 collection of recipes, would be down to $5, and in it was Ernest Hemingway's "Reviver," or "Death in the Gulf Stream." Formula: cracked ice in a tall glass; four dashes of Angostura; juice & crushed peel of one lime--and "fill the glass with Holland gin."/-

Congressman Adolph J. Sabath of Illinois reached 80 fit as a fiddle, couldn't explain how. Wife Mae gave him a wifely buss at his birthday reception and Sabath gave the world his favorite recipe (The Sabath combination): 25% dry wine; 25% sweet wine; 20% brandy (or bourbon); 2% bitters; 15% cordial (almost any cordial); juice of one orange. Shake it up with ice (or without ice).

Personality Kids

Frederick Cecil ("Freddie") Bartholomew, wavy-haired Hollywood wonder-moppet of the '30s, missed marriage-by-elopement by a hair's breadth. Bachelor Bartholomew, now 22, had hardly declared his intention to wed his twice-wed pressagent when his Aunt Myllicent and he said he had changed his mind. Substitute declaration: Pressagent Maely Daniele would become Mrs. Bartholomew two months hence in a proper, full-blown Hollywood production.

Charles Boyer dealt a stunning blow to his parlor imitators. In Algiers, said he, he had never once uttered the much mimicked mutterance: "Calm wit me to de Cahsbah." However, lives-of-the-party would be furnished an easily memorized catch line in his very next picture. The line, recurring like a theme: "She sits a horse well."

Leopold Stolcowski & Wife Gloria made an eventful return to Manhattan from Mexico. Fifteen minutes after arrival, a stranger with a can opener opened their Cadillac and tried to make off with the baggage. Then Gloria sweetly drove the hard-boiled Manhattan press crazy. The little rich girl who had cut off her mother's $21,000-a-year allowance received reporters in a dingy, one-room workshop of the maestro's, handed them a mimeographed statement: "I have a natural filial regard for my mother. . . . It is certain that at no time . . . will my mother suffer privation. . . ." She smiled. She posed for pictures. But she just would not talk. The press gave up. Hearst's dressy Stuntwriter Inez Robb got satisfaction, of a sort. "I have never," she declared, "seen such filthy curtains!"

Ancients

Henry L. Mencken is a "dead duck" to today's college students, who dutifully study him like a remote classic. So said Howard Mumford Jones, Harvard English professor and veteran man of letters. The distressed teacher reported further, in The Atlantic: the boys can't understand O. Henry, don't know who George Ade was, and never heard of Mr. Dooley, The Gibson Girl, or even Little Nemo--who "is now one with Aristophanes and Richard Harding Davis. . . ." Teacher Jones decided to blame himself for this state of affairs, concluded that "my professional compeers and I have constructed literary history and left out all the fun."

Norman Douglas, whose South Wind was a last-generation classic, and who had himself become an almost legendary figure, piped up briefly out of the fog that had wrapped him in recent years. Now 77, white-haired, looking faintly like a patrician W. C. Fields, he was a "paying guest" at a modest lodging in London's quiet Thurloe Square.

Early in the war the famed Capri-dweller had been "missing on the Continent." Where had he spent those early years? "In Italy mostly," he told an interviewer, "--no, in France--no, Germany. Well, anyhow, what does it matter, it is of no importance."

South Wind had made him famous, but his books never brought him much of a living, and years ago he had sworn he would write no more--"Not for the wealth of Croesus!" Now he had changed his mind. But on the subject of his new book, or the volcanic state of the world, Author Douglas was mumchance or crotchety. Said he: "You won't get my views . . . because I have none."

* For news of another dress, see CANADA.

/- Which has a musty taste reminiscent of Irish whiskey.

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