Books: The Editors Like

Short Novels

THE VICTORIAN CHAISE LONGUEby Marghanita Laski. (Houghton Mifflin, $2.75.) Good horror stories are rare these days, but this one really comes off with a chill and will undoubtedly join the classics in its field. Positively not recommended for bedtime reading or a drowsy afternoon in the hammock.

THE FIRE-RAISERSby Marris Murray. (Farrar, Straus & Young, $3.00.) The doings of a group of eccentrics in a small South African town can be taken as a straight novel of human difficulties or as symbolic of conditions in South Africa. Either way, it s a compact, beautifully written book.

AROUND A RUSTY GODby Augusta Walker. (Dial, $3.00.) A very simple tale about a Chinese boy and his two goats contrives, like a good myth, to throw oblique light on a number of matters not directly connected with the affair.

Strange Adventures

HUNTER’S CHOICEby Alexander Lake. (Doubleday, $3.50.) Yarns, reflections, philosophy, and even a recipe for jugged lion, by a veteran African hunter who sounds just enough like Trader Horn to be irresistible.

CROCODILE FEVERby Laurence Earl. (Knopf, $3.95.) Full of narrow escapes and unexpected disasters, the story of a malcontent with a mania for crocodile hunting reads like adventure fiction, although it was told to the author as sober truth.

MOUNTAINS IN THE DESERTby Louis Carl and Joseph Petit. (Doubleday, $3.95.) Two members of a small expedition describe their investigations among Saharan mountains, Touaregs, and prehistoric carvings. The bonk concentrates on character and the technique of desert travel and is both amusing and exciting.

YANKEE WHALERS IN THE SOUTH SEASby A. B. C. Whipple. (Doubleday, $3.95.) A mixture of fact and legend about the great whaling days, not scholarly but fast, free-wheeling, candidly romantic entertainment.

Painting and Sculpture

THE PAINTINGS OF ZURBARANby Martin S. Soria. (Phaidon, $12.50.) The work of this great Spanish religious painter of the seventeenth century takes particularly well to reproduction in black and white (there are nine color plates among the two hundred and eighty illustrations) and the text is clear, scholarly, and unpretentious.

EARLY NETHERLANDISH PAINTINGby Erwin Panofsky. (Harvard University Press, 2 vols., $35.00.) In his history of Netherlandish painting from manuscript illustration to Roger van der Weyden, Professor Panofsky has produced a truly monumental book which combines vast learning with witty, readable prose. Text and plates, which though uneolored are remarkably effective, come in separate volumes.

SCULPTURE: THEME AND VARIATIONSby E. H. Ramsden. (British Book Centre, $8.00.) A survey of sculpture in the twentieth century, very well illustrated, in which the author’s thoroughness and the interest of his thesis compensate for a decidedly convoluted style.