A CHRISTMAS BUNDLE.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19180, 10 December 1927, Page 13

A CHRISTMAS BUNDLE.

There was a time when the only people the publishers remembered nt Christmas were the grey-headed old sentimentalists. Books were produced which made us remember our misguided youth, and for twenty-four hours feel strangely penitent and generous. But the young were not supposed to require any Christmas treatment, while Christmas seems now to be almost exclusively their literary preserve. Here, for example, is a bundle, or some typical volumes out of a bundlo sent by Nelson's:' "Five Hundred Pounds Reward," by Arthur 0. Cooke, a fat volume of nearly 350 pages, excellently printed and illustrated, and as full of excitement as a book can be which keeps to probabilities; "Tho Manor School," by H. Elrington, almost as fat though only half the price, full of cricket, hockey, dormitory, and class-room chatter, and amazing adventures with prefects, masters, and heads; and for those boys whoso appetite for print is more restricted there is "The Dosing of by Philip Beaufoy, the great merit of which is that it is complete in sections and in any case runs only to 130 pages altogether. Then there is an old favourite like the "Chummy Book." so well printed that it is a delight merely to turn the pages, and as excellently edited as ever, with "Silver and Gold," by Enid Blyton, for those who like jingles with a dash of humour. And it is the same if we turn from Nelson's to the other publishers— J. M. Dent, for example. "The Hunted Picaninnies," by W. M. Fleming, has a dingo or a black on every page, nnd of course enough boomerangs and spears to stock all the museums in the country. And those who don't like mere barbaric thrills, or like something besides thrills, may turn to "Rovers and Stay-at-Homcs," a most excellent hook on natural history by Maribel Edwin, the daughter of Professor J, Arthur Thomson. But it is not mere nature study. It is life stories of birds and seals and stags and otters told as fiction which never depart*

from fact. And after Dent's, since w« can only pick and pass on, there arttwo excellent little books from Saville and Co., London—"Child Verses from Punch," which has been noticed before in this column, and "Let's Pretend," poems by Georgette Agnew—both of which have reached us through Robertson and Mullens, Melbourne, and ard so good in quality that they make a class by themselves. Finally, Messrs T. C. anil E. 0. Jack, who are now another wing of Nelson's, have remembered the very little children and put "Little Red Ridinghood," "Puss in Boots," "Tho Babes in the Wood," "The Three Bears," «nd "Cinderella" into such an attractive Volume that parents will no nooner have bought it than they will be worrying about having to hand it over to be dog-eared, torn, and spread with jam.