LITERARY GOSSIP

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22521, 1 October 1938, Page 20

LITERARY GOSSIP

Fragment from Christopher Motley (in his “P. E. G. Quercus” guise): “In the motor ads in English papers we always get a grin at what they call ‘Muffled Pinking* (what we call “knocking’). We are strong for ‘modern’ poetry, but it does have a lot of just that. Muffled Pinking.”

And one more: “When we saw the headline ‘Leaves in De Grasse’ we thought of course it was something about Walt Whitman. But it was the author of ‘How to Win Friends,’ etc., sailing in the French Line; funny, we can’t think of his name.”

Bookshop news from the “New Yorker.” . . .

A lady in Brentano’s asked for a book on making vellum lampshades. “Ah, you want the arts and crafts department, madam. This is the fiction counter.” “Yes, I know. I want a novel about how to make vellum lampshades.” A college girl asked at Doubleday, Doran’s, recently, for Plato's “Republic.” “Plato?” said the salesgirl, wrinkling her brow. “Let’s see—that would be in the children’s depa tment, with the Mickey Mouse books,”

The “My Country” series of books inaugurated by Jarrolds, to which t Edward Shanks has contributed the volume, “My England” and A. G. Macdonell, Lord Dunsany, and Rhys Davies those, respectively, on Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, is to include one on New Zealand. Dr. A. J. Harrop has accepted an invitation to write it and has begun work. His aim is to picture New Zealand as it gradually revealed itself to him from his early days in Westland, Oamaru, and Christchurch, through the. period of his investigations into the early records of the Dominion in London, to the present day. He hopes to deal at some length with such topics as the newspapers, sport, literature, and educational position of the Dominion. It is expected that the volume will appear in good time for the Centenary.

Philateliterary item in P. E. G. Quercus’s “Trade Winds” column of the “Saturday Review of Literature”:

Though not much of a stamp collector we have been pleased to see the new French 2-franc timbre-postes showing' a charming little picture of Alphonse Daudet’s windmill. Though we haven’t read, him since school days

we think of AJD. affectionately as one of the pleasantest of writers. The stamp, we suppose, is to mark the centennial of his birth (1940),

More information about John Bunyan’s silver tankard, the search for which in the United States was referred to in this column recently. The tankard, of solid silver and weighing over 22 ounces avoirdupois, has engraved on the front in interlaced capitals, “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” On the bottom, in script, is engraved “The Gift of Nathaniel Ponder to Elizabeth, Wife of John Bunyan, of Bedford,” besides the date - of “1671.” The tankard was traced through many vicissitudes to a Chicago collector and was last reported in Chicago in 1884, at the jewellery store of Giles Brothers. The researcher most anxious to locate the tankard is Dr. Frank Mott Harrison, whose present address is 3 Bigwood avenue. Hove, Sussex. More unlikely things have happened than the transfer of the missing tankard, somehow, at some time, between 1884 and 1938, to New Zealand!

The diaries of Gouvemeur Morris, United States Minister to France during the Reign of Terror, hitherto unpublished except for meagre extracts in Jared Sparks’s 1832 edition of Morris’s letters and the incomplete selection which appeared under the editorship of Anne Carey Morris in 1888, will be printed in full as “A Diary of the French Revolution,” edited by Beatrix Davenport, Morris’s great-granddaughter. The diaries cover a period of four years, 178993, and tell the story of the Revolution from the standpoint of one who was on intimate terms with the leading personages of the time.

The librarian of the Canterbury Public Library reports that recent accessions include two volumes dealing with international relations, “World’s Design,”, by S. de Madariaga, and Sir E. Grigg’s “Britain Looks at Germany.” Other interesting volumes added are “Shrines and Homes of Scotland,” by Sir J. S. Maxwell, Dame Ethel Smyth’s “Maurice Baring.” and V. Seligmann’s “Puccini among Friends.”

In fiction, two excellent thrillers are “Postscript to Poison,” by Dorothy Bowers, and “Indigo Death,” by Max Saltmarsh. Daphne du Maiirier’s splendid novel, “Rebecca," and Olive Prouty’s American story, “Lisa Vale,” have also been added.