JOURNALIST'S ESSAYS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 4, 21 July 1939, Page 37

JOURNALIST'S ESSAYS

FIRST WITH THE SUN. Essays by Alan Mulgan, with 47 Drawings by Olivia Spencer Bower. J. M. Dent & Sons, London. 244 p.p. (London Price, 6/-.) No one knows better than Mr. Mulgan how dangerous it is to reprint newspaper articles, especially in New Zealand, where newspaper work is newspaper work and can’t be anything else. But no one else in New Zealand has such a storehouse to draw from. Good things, bad things, and lucky accidents have dropped almost daily from his pen for thirty years, and it has been quite easy for him therefore to put together a book of 240 pages which contains nothing of which any journalist would be ashamed. He has also been able to include things that the most fastidious editor catering for bookish (but not too bookish) readers would have been glad to print-an astonishing performance in a man whose average day since he was twenty (Saturdays and Sundays not excluded) must have meant, until four or five years ago, eight or ten or twelve hours in the wine-press of journalism. He ‘has, of course, once or twice, given himself a busman’s holiday. He has been to England and refreshed himself there by grinding in libraries and seeing books through the press. Quite recently he has turned from journalism to broad-casting-given up a job whose toughest problem he had mastered for another that no one has begun to understand. So he has thrown off these three dozen essays, and at least a hundred dozen more, in circumstances that ninety-nine writers in a hundred would have regarded

as an excuse for life-long sterility. Let him who thinks he can do better throw the first stone. Mr. Mulgan has, however, thrown one fat sop to Cerberus. His text is adorned, as well as illustrated, by forty-seven line drawings by Olivia Spencer Bower, modern enough to be in the mode, and just mannered enough to have _ individuality. As prices go these days, the purchaser is lucky who gets all this for 6/-.