Search results

FEW people would deny that the most remarkable recent development in publishing is the Book Club. Not everybody would agree that the influence of such clubs on writing is potentially as great as their influence on the mechanics of selling, but that is the fact, and the clubs should be carefully watched by all who would like to see literature free. The clubs vary greatly in size and seriousness. Some are almost entirely comic. Others, like the Book Society, have an academic air and confer a quite important cachet, a kind of literary Monthly Medal. How is their standing justified ? The Left Book Club is actually a publishing concern, and the Right Book Club is run by a bookseller. Commerce and ideology are running in harness.

COMPETITION among national newspapers has led to some very peculiar developments in British journalism, but there has been nothing quite so startling and, indeed, so dangerous, as the new sentimental style. We are proud of our Press. Like our police force, it is the finest in the world, and nobody knows that better than the Press itself. We are frequently reminded that the Press of Italy, Germany and Russia is enslaved, and that the Press of France and the United States is free but licentious. Our Press is not enslaved, nor is it licentious, nor is it corrupt. These are weighty recommendations, but they are negative and they are not enough. We should begin to realise that our popular Press is becoming quite startlingly silly.

RECENTLY, visiting Honolulu, it all came back to my mind clearly. I had gone out to the famous Diamond Head for two reasons: I wanted to have a good view of the China Clipper sailing over, on the last lap of her trans‐Pacific flight, from Hawaii to California; and to see Diamond Head lighthouse for Stevenson's sake, as it was there that he made Loudon Dodd, in The Wrecker, meet a sailor from a man‐of‐war who inadvertently gave him some information regarding the mystery of that story. For Stevenson's sake also I had gone to Waikiki, a changed Waikiki from his day. The banyan‐tree in the shade of which he used to sit is surrounded by bungalows. A metal plate, commemorative of him and of his young friend the Princess Kaiulani has been placed on the tree by the Daughters of Hawaii.

Literature is the word that comes to one's lips when Arundell Esdaile's name is heard. He wrote only a few general essays nd a little verse, in Autolycus' Pack, and a volume of verse, Wise Men from the East, but he had fine taste in letters, and he was an artist in lucid, pure English, at once light and fluent, dignified and impressive, even when his subject was bibliography or his “recreation,” librarianship.

TRAVELLING from King's Cross by the “Flying Scotsman” one day last Summer, the Editor found himself at tea‐time in the excellent company of an American lady. Not much was being said, but he gathered that the lady was bookish, and that she was from the Middle West. Taking the chance, he asked her how Dr. Bostwick was keeping, and the query elicited the fact that the lady was Dr. Bostwick's chief of staff in the Reference Department of St. Louis Public Library, and that she carried a name well‐known to librarians everywhere. Since going home, Miss Katharine T. Moody has been good enough to send an interesting letter, and we have now received her permission to quote from it:

IF I say that I knew Edmund Gosse, I mean merely that I once persuaded him to address the Library Assistants' Association. Later we exchanged a few letters on poetry. He came, a white‐haired, pink‐faced, portly man in the middle fifties, well‐groomed, and of that old‐world stately type which almost, but not quite, ascends to pomposity; sure of himself, as one who was accepted as the first of literary critics had a right to be. He appealed to us to work, light‐heartedly, under the aegis of that god most benign to literature and books, Mercury, and to forsake the gloomy influences which he thought pervaded our writings. That was after a rapid study of The Library Assistant of 1906.

ON the library front generally we have no event to record of what may be called bibliothecal importance for, our readers will readily understand, the induction of Mr. Cashmore as President for 1946, which took place at Birmingham under the chairmanship of the Lord Mayor on February 13, happened too late to be included in these pages. An account will, of course, be in our March number. It is, however, a singularly gracious matter that it should have occurred to the Council to hold the ceremony in the second greatest English city, which also happens to be the home and work‐field of the new President. Only rarely does a man receive such honour in his own place, as we have divine warrant for mentioning. Probably in other ways also Mr. Cashmore is an exception, because we have ample evidence of the regard in which Midlanders hold him. The presence of the Lord Mayor was perhaps to be expected when an Association holding the Royal Charter visits his town officially, but we are assured that it is also a tribute to the esteem in which Mr. Cashmore is held.

In the 1940s the teams of the BBC's Transatlantic quiz included such formidable intellectuals as Thomas Bodkin, Christopher Morley and Denis Brogan; and once they were joined by David Niven. On that occasion it was almost midway through the programme before the London questionmaster said with obvious surprise and relief: