Everyman’s Diamond Jubilee

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31119, 23 July 1966, Page 4

Everyman’s Diamond Jubilee

This year is the 60th anniversary of the founding of Everyman's Library. Joseph Malaby Dent launched the library in 1906, putting out 155 volumes during the year: when he died in 1926, 762 volumes had been published and sales had exceeded 20 million. Now, as Everyman’s celebrates its Diamond Jubilee it can claim that 50 million copies have been sold by booksellers all over the world; over 1200 volumes have appeared in Everyman’s; some 700 are always in print, and current stocks in the publishers’ warehouse total over 2 million copies. ! To celebrate a stupendous [ publishing achievement, the I publishers have assembled an anthology (of the usual Everyman’s size and format) providing excerpts, grave and gay, predominantly

prose, which testify to Everyman's interests everywhere in literature. (Everyman’s Library draws on the literatures of 21 languages.) The editor’s aim has been to select excerpts that are not only sufficiently self-contained to “read” by themselves but also to suggest the qualities of the respective writers. Another feature of the Diamond Jubilee year is the preparation of a number of titles to be available, in either the standard binding or in a new maroon binding, with a transparent glassine jacket. Everyman’s progressive policy of adding, revising, reissuing continues. Newly to hand are Trollope's “The Last Chronicle of Barset” and “The Diary of John Evelyn,” both in two volumes and printed in the new larger format. Each has a new intro-

duction. Other reissues are “Bevis: the Story of a Boy” by Richard Jefferies, “The Natural History of Seibourne” by Gilbert White, “The Three Musketeers” by Dumas, Cowper’s “Poems,” and two romances, “Manon Lescaut” by the Abbe Prevost, and “Carmen” by Prosper Merimee in one volume. An addition to Everyman’s is “Pan Tadeusz” by Adam Mickiewicz, the greatest of Polish poets. The poet’s purpose is to present a slightly idealised picture of country life among the gentry in Lithuania on the eve of Napoleon’s expedition into Russia in 1812. The story in verse, reminiscent of Sir Walter Scott, has been translated by Kenneth Mackenzie, a classical scholar of New College, Oxford.