Alistair Cooke, U.S. correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, recently surveyed the reaction of U.S. critics to a new book by an Australian author (Chester Wilmot's The Struggle for Europe--TIME, March 31). "Since TIME magazine is the most influential book page in the country," Cooke said, "it is safe to assume that several million Americans who will never read the book have already taken instruction in how they ought to feel if they had."

Cooke might better have said, "how they might feel if they had read the book." For the great number of you who buy books, TIME tries to offer a selective guide, rather than give "instruction," on what is best in contemporary reading. Few people have the time to read the 200-odd books reviewed in the section each year; fewer still have the opportunity to cull the lists of 10,000 or more books published in this country each year. TIME tries in its reviews to tell you enough about the better books to help you decide which ones you would most like to read and own.

The job of distilling each week's output of new volumes falls to Books Editor Max Gissen. Gissen scans an average of almost 100 new books a week. (During the spring and fall publishing seasons, the weekly figure sometimes goes as high as 150.) By the end of the year he has thumbed through virtually every published "trade book," i.e., those offered to the general public.

In spite of this prodigious amount of reading, Gissen says that he is a slow reader. "Books that I scan, I scan very quickly. I can usually tell in ten minutes if they're worth reviewing. For a review, I read very, very slowly. It's one thing to read for simple enjoyment; it's quite another thing to read for style, meat and accuracy. That isn't to say that I don't enjoy reading the books I review. It's not carefree reading, but it can be fun and it is."

Gissen finds that he must spend a disproportionate amount of time on new writers. He first reads 30 or 40 pages to find out how well the new author writes. Then he samples the rest of the book to see what the writer has to say. Gissen believes such careful screening is one of the most important parts of his job, says: "It is the cardinal sin of a book reviewer or editor not to spot a fine new writer."

On Friday afternoons he meets with Senior Editor Jack Tibby, Books Researcher Mary Ellin Berlin, and TIME'S three other reviewers : Theodore E. Kalem, Irving Howe and Henry Bradford Darrach Jr. ( A fifth reviewer is ex-TiME Writer Nigel Dennis, now living in England.) Gissen gives a thumbnail outline of each of the books he has scanned, and the week's assignments are handed out.

Gissen himself reviews one book a week, sometimes two, on rare occasions has done three. "If TIME'S reviews are different from most, it's not because we consciously try to make them different," he says. "The writing criteria are the same as those that govern the rest of the magazine: keep the cliche out -- both in phraseology and idea; write a review that is interesting to read for itself; tell whether the reviewer thinks the book is worth reading, whether it has anything to say."

Gissen, who once spent several months with a friend in a Vermont lumberman's cottage, "reading hundreds of books and Baying healthy," wrote reviews for the New Republic before he went into the Army as an infantry private in 1942. Four years later he came out a captain, with Bronze and Silver Stars and five battle stars. He joined TIME'S staff in March 1946, wrote for the PRESS section, occasionally for ART and Music, then became a book reviewer early in 1947.

One of his more pleasant assignments consisted of spending several days in Nassau with John P. Marquand for a cover story (TIME, March 7, 1949). Marquand later told fellow Book-of-the-Month Club judges: "I never got such an awful going over" as he received at the hands of Gissen and Researcher Ruth Mehrtens. A later postscript came just a few weeks ago, when Gissen met Marquand, who said: "All the time you were using me I was using you." Marquand, who had drawn on the TIME team for characters in his new book, Melville Goodwin, USA, asked Gissen to convey his apologies to Miss Mehrtens for portraying her as an unpleasant character in the book.

Cordially yours,

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