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MANY OF US who enjoyed some years of childhood before our world blew up in August 1914 had the inestimable advantage of being born into a family where books and reading were of paramount importance. Learning to read myself at an early age, because for one thing I was finding the books read aloud to younger members of the family too childish, but also because I as the eldest was encouraged to take on the task of reading aloud, throughout my life I have never escaped the ‘fascination of the printed page’.

NO ONE WOULD ALLEGE that reading travel books can entirely take the place of real travel, but it is a very delightful substitute. The country I love most and wish to know better is Italy, a country which has always held a particular attraction for the English, who have been said to be ‘born with two ineradicable loves — one for the England that breeds them, and the other for the Italy that lures them’, and the result has been a number of fascinating travel books, which I have gradually discovered, and obtained from the library.

WHILE MIGUEL DE CERNANTES SAAVEDRA languished as a guest of King Philip of Spain in a small noisome cell of the Madrid prison, he had time to do two things. He wrote each day at a rickety table with the quill and parchment he had bribed his jailer to supply. His manuscript concerned an old gentleman farmer, grey, lean, and weatherbeaten—like Cervantes himself, then fifty‐six—who had read so many books about chivalry that ‘his brain had dried up and he had gone completely out of his mind’. The old man was obsessed that he must leave his farm and ride out as the knights of old had done into a world of giants, maidens in distress and deep enchantment. Nearly four hundred years later the name of the old knight‐errant is still world famous, for Cervantes chose with care the name of his run‐down hero, Don Quixote. (Cervantes spelt it Quijote.)

IN THE DAYS BEFORE TYPEWRITERS, stenographers, and tape‐recorders, when every word of a book was written by hand, revised by hand, and eventually printed from the handwritten manuscript, the industry required to produce such a history as that of Gibbon is remarkable. How much more remarkable the industry of women writers, in days when authorship for women was not always regarded as a respectable profession. Consider the output of Jane Austen, compelled to write in a corner of the family sitting‐room, and to conceal her papers hastily if a caller arrived, or Mrs Trollope, nursing her dying son by day, and writing all night to support her family.

THE RELICS OF A WRITER, his manuscripts, typescripts and memorabilia, have no life of their own, but they give life: they generate and resurrect. Too often they are abused, their products peddled to advance a thesis of no virtue, but this is the nature of things. Yet without them, properly handled, as they should be in an archive, there is no revelation: and not just for scholars either, less for them than for those who love O'Hara. Just a contemplation of them can bring some of him back to those who love and have some inkling of the concern and the care he had for his craft and his creation. He was a concerned man; he had a conscience. He sought and engaged the craft and sullen nature of his gift until it became as much a part of him as his fist. It became as much a part of him as his mind and body; it became his life. No photostat, microform, information retrieval can ever, will ever, replace the true relics, so that the place that holds them becomes for all who need or desire them a singular place, a side altar as well as a memorial. This is both meet and proper, for John O'Hara was a religious writer. He was not unique in this—all good writers are, one way or another—but he was one, especially; a moralist, in a Brooks Brothers shirt, in his bespoke shoes off Peal Brothers. Writing was his rod and his staff. To die in harness, shining in use, was his good luck that we must be thankful for. Requiescat in Pace, as he wrote of Philip Barry, another of them, in his dedication to him of The Farmers Hotel, a book that notched me. O'Hara knew what he was about. He was like one who keeps the deck by night, bearing the tiller up against his breast; he was like one whose soul was centred quite in holding course although so hardly pressed. And veers with veering shock now left now right,