MANY BOOKS

Evening Star, Issue 22448, 19 September 1936, Page 23

MANY BOOKS

If you believe, as X do, that too many books are published, a glance at ‘ Whitaker’s Cumulative Rook List ’ for the first half of 1936 will probably induce a feeling of depression (says ‘John o’ London’s Weekly’). For here, tabulated with a clarity which must commend itself to the harassed bookseller, is a record of 8;576 books published in Groat Britain since January. The total, as I pointed out a few weeks ago, is 159 less than last year’s, but even so it is imposing. Take fiction. No fewer than ‘1,968 volumes are listed under this heading. Of these, 1,829 are either reprints, new editions, translations, or editions de luxe. The remainder are novels or books of short stories not previously published. How much of that new fiction was worth printing, I wonder? It is difficult to see how even a nation of novel writers can produce 1,139 meritorious works of fiction in six months. The tfuth is, of course, that many of these books do not pretend to be literature. Apparently they are written in response to a demand, and while that demand exists the publishers can hardly be blamed for doing their utmost to satisfy it. _ Fiction accounts for much tlie biggest proportion of the half-yearly total. Next in order of popularity come children’s books and minor fiction, educational works, books on religion and theology, and biography and memoirs. The combined totals amount to just over 2,000 volumes. “ I remember a hundred years ago, I was nearly three years old at the time. . . .” Here is surely an ideal opening sentence for a book, but one you would expect to be confined to a work of fiction It is, however, the opening sentence of the memoirs—which she has just begun to write—of 103-year-old Mrs Mary Dowler Tenfold, an alert, bright-eyed lady living in the Kentish village of Penshurst. Mrs Penfold was present at the coronation of Queen Victoria. saw the Duke of Wellington’s funeral, and remembers the bread riots —when bread cost 25s a week for a family of six With such an opening sentence her memoirs should be worth writing—and reading.