ISSUE: Summer 1945
Fiction
“The Long Journey” offers in one volume Johannes V. Jensen’s Nobel prize winning trilogy of novels: “Fire and lce,” “The Cimbrians,” and “Christopher Columbus.” The translation from the Danish is the work of Arthur G. Chater and Francis Hackett has written an introduction for this edition [Knopf $3.50]. Random House has brought out an exceptionally attractive edition of “Green Mansions,” well printed and well bound, with illustrations by K. McKnight Kauffer. [$3.95]. Carl Van Doren has written an introduction for the collection of “Twenty Stories” by Stephen Crane brought out as a Forum Hook by the World Publishing Company. The paper and binding are not of very good quality but the book offers an excellent assortment of Crane’s short stories for a small sum [$1]. “The Best Short Stories of O. Henry” here given are thirty-eight in number chosen from more than six hundred by Bennett Cerf and Van H. Cartmell. The volume is one of the latest in the Modern Library and sports an appealing dust cover [95 cents]. Another recent addition to the Modern Library is “Great Tales of the American West,” edited and with an introduction by Harry E. Maule [95 cents].
History and philosophy
A reprint that is both timely and significant, and attractive in format as well, is the first Borzoi edition of Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” first published in Paris in 1835 (the second part in 1840) and first reproduced in New York in 1838 and 1840 [ Knopf 2 vols. $6]. Arthur Bernon Tourtellot has compiled a thoughtful and useful volume in “Woodrow Wilson: Selections for Today,” in which those parts of Wilson’s public papers and presidential addresses which have a direct bearing on America and the. world today are arranged to heighten their current significance [Duell, Sloan & Pearce $2.75]. The “Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas” have been edited and annotated with an introduction by Anton C. Pegis. In it are included the
whole of Part I of the “Summa Theologiea,” and parts of the Second Part, as well as some sections of “Summa ContraGentiles.” The two substantial volumes are well bound and well printed [Random Mouse $7.50]. A Pantheon book of interest is an anthology of mysticism, “The Soul Afire,” edited by H. A. Reinhold, and including, besides excerpts from truly mystical writings, a number of texts which are not mystical but furnish an approach to understanding those which are [$3.50] “The Angel of Peace,” written by the seventeenth-century Czech humanist John Amos Comenius and sent to the. peace ambassadors of England and the Netherlands in Breda in 1667 has been translated from Latin into English by Dr. W. A. Morison and is published with an introduction by Matthew Spinka [Pantheon $2]. In 1860 the first edition of Jacob Burckhardt’s “The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy” appeared and since then it has been reprinted many times. This present edition, a pocket-size Phaidon Press volume, is a complete and unabridged English rendering of the second original edition, in Middlemore’s translation, first published in two volumes in 1878 [Oxford $2.50].
LITERATURE IN GENERAL
Newman Ivey White’s two-volume life of Shelley has been abridged by the author and now appears, without the appendiees and notes of the. longer work, as a “Portrait of Shelley” [Knopf $4 “The Old Plantation,” a poem by Joseph Addison Turner, first published in 1862, three years after its completion, has been edited by Henry Prentice Miller, and appears in Series II of the Emory University Library Sources and Reprints [50 cents] Carl Van Doren has himself chosen goodly number of his own works to fill new volume in the Viking Portable Library, the portable “Carl Van Doren” [$2.50]. “A personal anthology, selected for re-readability from the writers of 2000 years for the reader of today” is how Louis Kronenberger describes his Viking Portable “Reader’s Companion.” A good, book for the browser [$2].
