I HAVE been looking over the figures representing the books published throughout the world in 1929. In each case the statistics include the new books, and the new editions of old books. England published 10,354 titles, the United States 10,187. Germany 27,794, France 11,893, Spain 2374, Bulgaria 2379. And this mass production continues despite the fact that people live in smaller and smaller homes and have less and less space in which to house their belongings. It is time we made smaller, if not fewer, books. . . . The recipients of the Guggenheim Fellowships (about $2500 for study abroad) have been announced. Among the eighty-five were Thomas Wolfe, the novelist, and the author of Look Homeward, Angel (Scribner)— a book worth reading; Edward Davison, the English poet and lecturer, who lives in Brooklyn; Doctor Joseph Wood Krutch, associate editor of the Nation, and author of that most provocative volume. The Modern Temper (Harcourt, Brace); Helen Hull, the novelist, whose last book. The Askein Price (Coward-McCann), is well spoken of; Phelps Putnam, the Boston poet ; Dr. Leslie Hot son, who disinterred the account of Marlowe’s murder and but recently brought to light the new Shelley Letters (Atlantic Monthly Press); and Owen Lattimore, author of The Desert Road to Turkestan (Little, Brown) and now in Manchuria, gathering material for a book to be entitled Frontiers of Inner Asia. Here is more literature in the making!
