As America Sees Us

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 121, 17 October 1941, Unnumbered Page

As America Sees Us

FoR a while, there was a craze for fancy printing. * But after all, the purpose of printing is to be read, and some of these-I suppose I should call them modern-methods of printing made it very difficult to read even the ‘name of the book. One publisher dropped all capital letters. The author’s

name looked very odd beginnifig with small letters. Others used a type rather like Chinese characters. You had to peer at it very closely to read it. Novelty has its . uses, but when it defeats the main end, which is to -be clearly tread, it hasn’t much to recommend it. It’s rather amusing to compare the different type of jacket your American publisher will put on the same book. I

have no chance of seeing a rough draft of the American version before it is published, but their artist’s idea of the New Zealand scene is often comic, I have one book, with a New Zealand setting, and in the American jacket there is a grim, grey old castle, which looks centuries old, perched on top of a high hill, and below is a village with a type of house that is entirely foreign in this country. They are tall, narrow, three-storied houses with sharp gables, and the foliage looks more like the cactus growth of their own desert lands. Still the heroine has all her clothes on, and is not being molested by a black-browed villain. — ("Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax," Nelle Scanlan, 2YA, September 9.)