Balancing the books

JOHN RIDDELL

Presenting some critical guide-posts to aid the literary shopper during the approaching Yuletide

■ The gift problem this Christmas ought to be a pretty simple one. What with the market depression, and Rodney's tonsilitis, and poor Fred out of a job, and one thing on top of another, the question of what to give your friends this Yuletide is no question at all. This Yuletide, all they get is a Book.

There are, in brief, two methods of giving a Book. One is going right out and buying a Book. The other and more widespread plan is cleaning up the copy of Trader Horn or The Mansions of Philosophy which you received last Christmas from Aunt Harriet, wrapping it up in clean holly-paper, and giving it away again this Christmas, probably to Aunt Harriet.

In preparing a Book to be given away again this Christmas, the first and most important step is to get rid of the ink inscription which some well-meaning moron always insists upon writing on the fly-leaf. This may be done by rubbing it with an ink-eraser, scraping it with a pen-knife, applying ink-eradicator, scraping it again with a pen-knife (while still damp) until you have succeeded in digging through the paper entirely, finally ripping out the flyleaf and the first two pages entirely, leaving only a couple of jagged bits of paper clinging suspiciously to the binding. Next remove the soiled wrapper, substituting the fresh wrapper of some other book. (If you cover a copy of Mary Baker Eddy with the jacket of Ex-Wife, for example, you will add considerably to the festivity of the holiday season.) Now run over the book carefully, turning back the creased corners of pages, prying up the mashed beetle which apparently crawled between pages 6 and 7 the night you left it out in the hammock, pasting hack the frontispiece that Junior ripped out, and scouring of! the thumb-prints, tobacco stains and smudges of peanut-butter with a soft rubber eraser; wrap the renovated volume in tissue paper and a gay red ribbon; and deliver it bright and early on Christmas morning, never recalling until you are on your way home that you forgot entirely to remove that little gift card reading "To Edna and Jo, with a very merry Xmas from Louisa G.", which you had left as a book-mark between pages 46 and 47.

• That is one way of giving a Christmas Book. If, on the other hand, you are boxing a Book—and that means you are way up in the moneyed class—you will find a particularly handsome and varied shelf of choices awaiting you this season. For some reason the literary output for 1930 is well above par. Tt may be that the market crash has brought a lot of hitherto retired authors scurrying out of their burrows, eager to recoup finances; or it may be merely that I am more tolerant because I have just published a book myself (The John Riddell Murder Case, Scribner's: $2.00. Advt.) But whatever the cause, your problem this year is not going to he to find a good book; it is going to be to decide which good book, in your particular case, is the best.

In order to help the reader solve this problem, therefore, I have ventured to suggest an itemized Christmas list, based in the main on the current publishers' lists. If your special case does not happen to fall under one of the following characterizations, you will he pretty safe in selecting a title either from the first list, or the last:

For Yourself (after all, some things are not to be given away ) :

Mr. Currier and Mr. Ives by Russel Crouse (Doubleday, Doran) ; Lives of a Bengal Lancer by F. Yeats-Brown (Viking) ; The Last Rustler by Lee Sage (Little Brown) ; John Held Jr.'s Dog Stories (Vanguard); Laments for the Living by Dorothy Parker (Viking); I'm Sorry If IHave Offended, by Clarence Knapp (Putnam); American by Frank B. Linderman (John Day); archy and mehitabel by Don Marquis (Doubleday, Doran); In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner's); Treasurer's Report by Robert Benchley (Harper); Madman's Drum by Lynd Ward (Cape and Smith); Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham (Doubleday, Doran); Memoirs of an Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon (Coward-McCann); As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (Cape and Smith); Camera Obscura by William Bolitho (Simon and Schuster).

To give to your wife (a) if you are married:

The Tool of the Family by Margaret Kennedy (Doubleday, Doran); Mirthful Haven by Booth Tarkington (Doubleday, Doran); On Forsyte 'Change by John Galsworthy (Scribner's) ; The Edwardians, by Virginia Sackville-West (Doubleday, Doran) ; Angel Pavement by J. B. Priestly (Harper); Simple Confession by Baird Leonard (Cosmopolitan); Stories by Katherine Mansfield, selected by J. Middleton Murry (Knopf) ; A Note In Music by Rosamond Lehmann (Henry Holt); Vagabonds by Knut Hamsun (Coward-McCann).

(b) if you are not:

Millie by Donald Henderson Clarke (Vanguard) ; Strangers May Kiss by Ursula Parrott (Cape and Smith) ; Frankie and Johnnie by John Huston (Boni).

To give to a young cousin named Francine, who is an earnest member of the Junior League, has a friend in Dartmouth, is letting her hair grow out and fainted twice at Dracula, who is torn between a perfect whirl of charity bazaars, milk committees and Bide-A-Wee benefits, and who squeezes in just enough time between teas to keep up on the hooks that everybody is reading, my dears:

24 Hours by Louis Bromfield (Stokes) ; Laments for the Living by Dorothy Parker (Viking); Queer People by Grahame Judson (Vanguard Press); In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner); Shepherds in Sackcloth by Sheila Kaye-Smith (Harpers); Ride the Nightmare by Ward Greene (Cape and Smith); The Men in Her Life by Warner Fabian (Sears).

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To give to Great-Uncle Abner who lives on West End Avenue, plays a little bridge, has no children, subscribes to a lecture course at Carnegie Hall, prefers biographies to fiction because there is more meat in them, by George, and is expected to shuffle along any time now and leave you something quite substantial, in addition to getting the books back again:

Daniel Webster by Claude M. Fuess (Little, Brown); Mr. Currier and Mr. Ives by Russel Crouse (Doubleday, Doran){ Goodbye to Western Culture by Norman Douglas (Harper); Pre-War America by Mark Sullivan (Scribner); I'm Sorry If I Have Offended by Clarence Knapp (Putnam); Letters of Henry Adams (Houghton Mifflin); Etchings of Levon West (William Edwin Rudge); Swift by Carl Van Doren (Viking); A Book of Days for 1931 by Christopher Morley (John Day); Adams Family by James Truslow Adams (Little, Brown); and any of the Masters of Etching, Colour Prints or Sporting Print Series published by William Edwin Rudge.

To give to Floyd Gibbons (to keep) :

The Autobiography of Floyd Gibbons by Floyd Gibbons (Gibbons).

To give to a seductive lady in black in an apartment in the West Fifties, with a tattooed (left) thigh and a slight foreign accent that shifts with the European watering seasons, who is seen occasionally at The Eiffel lower in London and Casanova in Paris, whose lips can determine with equal ease the year of a wine or the years of a gentleman, and whose books are calculated, like her perfumes, for a certain purpose:

Salome by Viereck and Eldridge (Liveright); Parties by Carl Van Vechten (Knopf); Smart Setback by Wood Kahler (Knopf); Via Manhattan by Hawthorne Hurst (King); Between Dawn and Sunrise by James Branch Cabell (McBride); The Sweet Cheat Cone by Marcel Proust (Boni); The Fountain of Life by Havelock Ellis (Houghton Mifflin)

To give to a Younger Brother in New Haven, with a crushed-in felt hat, raccoon coat, no garters except an orchid one hanging over his dresser, a slight purple discoloration under his right eye, and a young lady awaiting him (for two hours) in a speakeasy on 52nd Street:

In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (Scribners); Laments for the Living by Dorothy Parker (Viking); Thirteen Men by Tiffany Thayer (Claude Kendall): Charlie Chan Carries On by Earl Derr Biggers (Bobbs-Merrill); Lone Cowboy by Will James (Scribners); Instigation of the Devil by Edmund Pearson (Doubleday, Doran); The Great Jasper by Fulton Oursler (Covici-Freide): and any of the current crop of mystery stories.

To give to John Cowper Powys (across his back-side) :

In Defense of Sensuality by John Cowper Powys (Simon and Schuster).

To give, "with thanks for our delightful weekend at the Rookery," to a Montclair, N. J. hostess with a bright mole under her right shoulder blade and a daughter who calls her "Babs", who plays contract on Tuesdays, exhibits every year in the Grand Central Flower Show, never sits twice in the same box at the opera, and adores reading in bed:

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Mysterious IVaye by Pcrcival Wren (Stokes); The Little Dog Laughed by Leonard Merrick (Dutton); Shepherds in Sackcloth by Sheila Kayc-Smith (Harpers); Blowing Clear by Joseph C. Lincoln (Appleton); Queen Anne's Lace, by Francis Parkinson Keyes (Liveright); 24 Hours by Louis Bromfield (Stokes); Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes (Houghton Mifflin).

To give to her coloured upstairs-maid, who doesn't know how to read:

Parties by Carl Van Vechten (Knopf).

To give to a very good friend with a churchwarden pipe and a red leather armchair, two Llewellyn setters at his el how, crossed guns over the fireplace, and a smoke-stained library decorated with trophies of his latest expedition to Sumatra:

The Gun Club Cook Book by Charles Browne (Scribners); Desert Islands by Walter de la Mare (Farrar-Rinehart); Lives of a Bengal Lancer by F. YeatsBrown (Viking); The IVreck of the Dumaru by Lowell Thomas (Doubleday, Doran); The Last Rustler by Lee Sage (Little, Brown); Lone Cowboy by Will James (Scribners); John Held Jr.'s Dog Stories (Vanguard): Beasts Called Wild by Andre De.Maison (Farrar-Rinehart); A Yankee Adventurer by Holger Cahill (Macauley); Animal Children by Paul Eipper (Viking); Ancient Life in the Southwest by Edgar B. Hewitt (Bobbs-Merrill ); The Sea and the Jungle by H. M. Tomlinson (Harper); Mr. Currier and Mr. Ives by Russel Crouse (Doubleday, Doran); Famous Sporting Prints Series, particularly Boxing and Hunting published by William Edwin Rudge.

To give to the garbage man (thus saving a five-dollar tip as well as the necessity of reading the book) :

Parties by Carl Van Vechten (Knopf); Seed by Charles G. Norris (Doubleday, Doran); Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes (Houghton Mifflin); anything by Will Rogers; Strangers May Kiss by Ursula Parrott (Cape and Smith); Mencken and Shaw by Benjamin De Casseres (Silas Newton); Salome by Vierick and Eldridge (Liveright); 24 Hours by Louis Bromfield (Stokes); The Men in Her Life by Warner Fabian (Sears).

In addition, there are a few titles on the above conscientious list which, for one reason or another, demand special comment.