Books-For the More or Less Youthful
C., T. & Shuster, George N. & Clark, Edwin & Bayard, Martha & Eleanore, Sister M. & Walsh, Thomas & Center, Robert Innes & Crowley, Paul & Blassingame, Lurton & Stuart, Henry Longan & Crimmins, Nora & Kenny, John M. Jr. & Hurd, Enid & Mc-Guire, Harry & Benet, Laura & W., T. & E., G. T.
18 THE COMMONWEAL November 10, 1926 BOOKS-FOR THE MORE OR LESS YOUTHFUL JUVENILE BOOKS OF 1926 FROM out of the children's preferences let the selection be made of the best juvenile...
...1.00...
...Fortunately, however, two paragraphs do not spoil a good tale...
...Christmas Trees, oddly enough in this materialistic day, expresses the spirit of that joyful day in pretty fancy...
...The same publisher offers The Adventures of the Wandies ($1.00) which is a more imaginative creation...
...A clever point about the arrangement is that the same phrases and quaint expressions are used throughout the book, as if some old Russian story-teller were recounting them to you at one sitting...
...Any production of John Martin's has its own quiet charm, a charm especially designed for tiny children from three to eight...
...Certainly John Drinkwater, in his foreword to Stephen Southwold's book with that arresting title, Listen, Children, has succinctly limited "values"—"under twelve, Edward Lear...
...20 THE COMMONWEAL November 10, 1926 The Holly Tree and Other Christmas Stones, by Charles Dickens...
...IN the form of alphabet verses, Sister Mary Gertrude of Saint Elizabeth's Convent, New Jersey, outlines for children the story of Jesus in the Gospel, and the sacraments of the Church...
...Puss-in-Boots, by Laurence Housman (D...
...1.75...
...POLLY'S SECRET, the latest addition to the Beacon Hill Bookshelf, is permeated with the atmosphere of early New England, and a younger generation whom the highly colored thanes of the screen fail to convince, are sure to find it an interesting chronicle of the life that was really lived by the grandfathers and grandmothers whose faces gaze upon them from darkened portraits...
...Robert Iknes Center...
...2.00...
...The Adventures of Johnny T. Bear, by Margaret J. Mc-Elroy...
...Its solemn fun and common-sense complacency are its most inimitable assets...
...Books in which they can find Indians to their fancy include Kootenai Why Stories, by Frank B. Linderman (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...This seems to be nonsense so long as King Barrie reigns...
...Piquant black and white illustrations add to the lively appeal of May M. Sweet's translation of The Little Blue Man, Guiseppe Fandulli's bright story of the little fellow who was born in picture form (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company...
...and when both occur aoetaneoutly you must listen to such a thing as The Light Prfncew...
...The Light Princess, by George MacDonald...
...Four Times Once Upon a Time, by Margaret and Mary Baker...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...2.50...
...Oh, childhood, what crimes are committed in thy name...
...ENTERTAINMENT and instruction when combined successfully in a book for juveniles, go far toward achieving that difficult thing—a volume approved by both parent and child...
...We learn once more of the heroism of this sturdy and thrifty race who have known how to die defending their fields from the sea and their towns from the Spaniard...
...1.75...
...2.50) should, therefore, find a ready welcome...
...If you aren't too particular about your facts and your imagination is rather sharp, in listening to this recital, there is a great possibility of getting a splendid inkling into the genesis of Peter Pan...
...They do...
...Here you may meet Coyote and Buffalo Bill, share their adventures, and grow very fond of Old-Man...
...May Byron has retold for little people J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan and Wendy (Scribner's) with the approval of the author, and Thornton Burgess needs no introduction to the young reader, but his Billy Mink (Little, Brown) will...
...Fancy untrammeled becomes merrily accustomed to the company of fairies in Rachel Field's Eliza and the Elves (New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Harry McGuire...
...The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams...
...Some are purely fanciful...
...The grownup boy (as well as the boy in his 'teens) in whom the desire for the bright face of danger has never been quenched, will enjoy unreservedly this rattling yarn...
...0.75...
...This feature of our organization accounts to a large extent for the long list of representative concerns that have continued to send us their printing orders for many years...
...2.25...
...The translation and selection of the tales of The Foundling Prince are made with careful art, and excellent discrimination, and the decorations by Maurice "' Day and James D. Powell are fantastically appropriate...
...L HIS is a bright nonsense-story erf the adventures of Dan and Trochee, deputies from fairy-land, in the enchanted fliwer...
...Very young readers will find Mr...
...The picturesqueness of the setting, detail, and situation make a 22 THE COMMONWEAL November 10, 1926 strong appeal to the imagination for the stories are, for the most part, unfamiliar to American children whose fairy stories have been derived, in the main, from Teutonic sources...
...Parker describes the genesis of his tales in a genial introduction, and then proceeds to outline the adventures of a wide variety of animals...
...the Brother who reformed a thief by believing in him...
...Princesses as glamourous as imagined by Scheherezade, brave heroes with the magical powers described in The Thousand and One Nights, thrilling pictures of combats and conflicts with dragons, peris, deevs, and mythical monsters, are all combined in a book of haunting beauty...
...Charlie and the Surprise House, by Helen Hill and Violet Maxwell...
...Waul & Dyke, Inc., by Ethel Cook Eliot...
...Southwold's collection of short tales —designed to answer the age-old plea, "Tell me a story"— is a genuine contribution for parents, as well as for the youngest members of the family...
...Sken of the Sea, by Arthur Bowie Chrisman...
...Michaels, by John R. Uniack...
...The House That Ran Away, by Lola Pierce...
...Chappie, and Other Stories, by Constance Heward...
...And besides, who could ever grow tired of Grimm...
...The fervour and fire of Boris ArtzybashiefE may be seen to advantage this year in Padraic Colum's The Forge in the Forest (New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Piglet has "brains, personality, and charm...
...Requies cat in pace," is the type of book one gives to the father or mother who reads to the beginning child...
...Binding is, after all, a matter of some importance...
...T7LSEWHERE in this issue, the author of this book ex-•«—' plains how he did it...
...2.00...
...Milne has again written a book that it will be a joy to give to any young person from the ages of four to forty...
...Henry V eats away the walls of Harfleur with stone cannon balls—but through all the intrigue of villains and the trials of warfare serenely rides our hero, who thwarts the villains, wins the battle of Agincourt almost single-handed, regains the baronetcy his father lost through treachery, and —but there, we must not tell if he wins the lady...
...Appleton and Company) with rhythmical adventures told in verse, such as: "Old Puss, I'm afraid You're no good for trade...
...The American Twins of the Revolution, by Lucy Fitch Perkins...
...Entertaining nonsense-rhymes are scattered through the text...
...In the same class, one places The Treasure Ship (Scribner's) with its compilations of story and verse by Lady Cynthia Asquith...
...Don't you know what "ther" means?' 'Ah, yes, now I do,' I said quickly...
...Perhaps, for children, they are not always in as unquestionable taste as they might be, for there are many references and allusions to subjects better left untouched, yet November 10, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 23 these are made so subtly that one doubts if a child would comprehend them...
...1.75...
...The dust-cover modestly advises the book for "ages, six to eight...
...More than once we have suffered at the hands of literary enthusiasts about the Orient...
...New York: Barse and Hopkins...
...and I hope you do too, because it is all the explanation you will get...
...New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company...
...May we estimate on your printing...
...The book is a miscellany of prose and verse in which (for almost the only time this season) verse proves superior...
...2.00...
...Lola Pierce, in The House That Ran Away, has written a story for girls, combining the usual pranks of school-days with a certain mystery in an old Missouri farmhouse...
...The examples used are taken from the work of children, and the age of each child is given as an incentive to emulation...
...The Epic of Kings, retold by Helen Zimmern...
...The Voyagers: Legends and Histories of Atlantic Discoveries, by Padraic Colunt...
...All Summer to Play, by Elisabeth Lee...
...Text and drawings are simple, tasteful and lively...
...Never was such mirth of that particular order since Edward Lear laid down his pen...
...1.00...
...The tales, of course, are the familiar ones that have entered into cultured consciousness—Orpheus and his journey to the lower world, Deucalion's flood, the saga of Prometheus...
...Philadelphia: H. L. Kilner and Company...
...E. H. Shepard generously scattered throughout the book add much to the delight of the reader and the one to whom it is read...
...2.00...
...George N. Shuster...
...Appleton) will appeal—especially to those who have begun with Rose Fyleman's Fairies and Chimneys (Doran) ; for the fairy-lover, under guidance, will become the poetry-lover...
...Oriental ingenuity bobs up consistently, bringing to a happy end many desperate adventures...
...More than ever are writers, clever or merely smart, adventuring into the wonderland of Greek literature and mythology for their material...
...Lincoln for Boys and Girls, by Albert Britt...
...JVlISS LEE writes a charming story of a country house in Maryland in the 'eighties...
...The consideration of the three books listed above aod the general attention paid to stories for boys and girls at Christmas, reminds us that the creation of a special category for their benefit is an affair of comparatively recent growth, daring not much later back than the end of the eighteenth century...
...A few of them do remind one of the stories of the Brothers Grimm, especially The Sleeping Tsarevna and the Seven Giants, which has for its plot, the beautiful and wicked stepmother, jealous of her stepdaughter's beauty, who looks in...
...New York: Dodd, Mead and Company...
...Welcome Barbara, by Kathleen Cooney...
...So naturally Neil had cockiness...
...2.50...
...Boston: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Company...
...Artzybashieff is a sincere and conscientious artist who draws symbolically and with honest verve...
...They are not only technically excellent, but in reproducing the dress, buildings and manners of the time, achieve a fidelity that is archaeologi-cally correct without being archaic Thirty-five years have pasted since the beloved woman who edited St...
...Doolittle's thousands of readers...
...On Shining Wings, by Helen von Kolnitz Hyer...
...Boston: Marshall Jones Company...
...There are not many such alluring Chinamen to be found these days, either in art or out of it...
...Pedro of the Black Death, by C. M. Bennett...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...The simple, childlike faith in God, and the acceptance of things as they are, show an individuality distinctly different from the Anglo-Saxon...
...Mother Goose Song Book, by Holland Robinson and Mac Harshberger...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...Benet frequently breaks out into rollicking songs in the spirit of the Bab Ballads and the vocabulary of Kipling...
...Henry Longan Stuart...
...The Book of the United States, by Elsie Singmaster...
...and Jean Henri Fabre writes simply of great truths in Here and There in Popular Science (Century...
...Winnie-the-Pooh is the name Christopher gave his favorite bear...
...Herbert Asquith, Lady Margaret Sackville, Walter De La Mare, A. A. Milne, Lord David Cecil, and Katherine Tynan bring merry jingling verses to sandwich in between the tales with their gay songs...
...Here is the charming Peter Pan story retold for the tots of two and thereabouts with an unforgivable—if you value your peace when reading to children—second paragraph—"Then Wendy began to see that one didn't stay at two for the rest of one's life...
...But skip the paragraph and read on...
...1.50...
...English and American literature is lucky in having a great many books not written for the young, but which the young like to read...
...The story of the Scriptures, the sacraments and dogmas of the Church are clearly presented, and there are directions for schedules of time and practical aids in the conduct of Sunday-schools...
...Chick, by Lucy Fitch Perkins...
...It is certain that at least he managed to reinvest it with a charm that the Gradgrinds and Scrooges had managed considerably to abate since days when the Lord of Misrule held carnival throughout Europe from the Nativity until Epiphany...
...New York: Henry Holt and Company...
...1.75...
...Boston: Lothrop, Lee and Shepherd Company...
...1 HIS is a work "to keep busy the little hands and little heads," with pretty pictures and scissor-clippings that make up the paste-pot masterpieces of the nursery...
...Wonder Tales from Windmill Lands, by Frances Jenkins Olcott (Longmans, Green) with its fascinating stories of Sinterklaas and Pieterbaas, and of the man, who, as soon as he shaved one side of his face the hair grew on the other, will evoke a "read me that again" from the six-year-old or thereabout...
...2.00...
...New York: Samuel Gabriel Sons and Company...
...A boy's own adventures with the American Museum Greenland expedition is told by David Putnam in David Goes to Greenland (Putnam...
...Newer and more sprightly fashions have somewhat left aside (one hesitates to say, left behind) Bulwer Lytton's reconstitution of the life that went on in the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum before the judgment overwhelmed them...
...0.35...
...The Last Days of Pompeii, by Bulwer Lytton...
...The striking illustrations in color and the cover and format of Wilfred Jones would be excuse enough for the reissuing of The Epic of Kings...
...I *HE candle beam of a good deed in a needy world shines •*¦ from each of the six stories in Father Finn's volume under the title, Candles' Beams...
...Pip-pinella, the green hen canary casually discovered in an animal shop, is the motive for the extraordinary canary opera which makes the fortune of the humanitarian doctor and his circus troupe...
...The new volume of collected tales has quite as rich an assortment as had the first entry...
...It is a book which will entertain any up-to-date child conversant with the parlance of the daily newspapers...
...1.75...
...This is a wonderful age for kids...
...New York: George H. Doran Company...
...The Children's Book of Celebrated Towers, by Lorinda M. Bryant (New York: The Century Company...
...2.00...
...Christopher Robin lived behind a green door in the highest part of the same wood...
...But he would like Dorothy Lathrop's drawings...
...Denis Mackail has fancied the Kingdom of Semolina, a huge high rock in the middle of a vast desert, surrounded by savage tribes...
...The mystery-loving girl is thought of in Augusta Huiell Seaman's Secret of Tate's Beach (Century) and the adventure-loving child will find his reward in the Newbery Medal award, Shen of the Sea (Dutton) by Arthur Bowie Chrisman...
...Gipsy Nan's adventures with her friend, Sandy Sue, along the lake-shore and at school, have that touch of every-day happening with a spice of the adventurous that endears such a chronicle to the average child by giving the "make-believe" element in his or her own life the actuality of print...
...But "grownups" must not be too selfish with beautiful books...
...Its style is one that will charm...
...Bessy E. Creighton draws a tall and rather emaciated fairy—or wandy—who looks very cunning in black and white silhouette, with trees, shrubs, toadstools, and cobwebs for companions...
...New York: Longmans, Green and Company...
...0.75...
...New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company...
...1.75The Uncharted Island, by Walter Scott Story...
...New Yorki Doubleday, Page and Company...
...Mr...
...From out of a year's reading, the figures of the libraries of one southern city were compiled, and fairy-tales "led all the rest...
...Benet's scenes are laid in New York and the strange land of Kafiristan, touching, perhaps, on the borders of the Congo and not unknown to Munchausen and other travelers of better known veracities...
...1.75...
...John Martin's Big Book No...
...Doolittle, his coadjutor, Matthew Muggs, and the housekeeper duck, Dab-Dab, are guiding spirits, fascinates intensively until it is laid down...
...New York: The Century Company...
...Therefore Mr...
...2.00...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...5.00...
...David Hotfoot, by Dan Totheroh...
...2.00...
...It is also one of the best collections of interesting photographs we have seen recently...
...association with devoted, yet wild, Redskins...
...The Poor Relation's Story—a brave reassertment, not only of the right of the poor to their share of happiness, but of the fact that, somehow or other, they get it...
...Maida's Little School, by Inez Haynes Irwin...
...New York: The Universal Knowledge Foundation...
...New York: Frederick Warne and Company...
...These are scattered prodigally through the text...
...Here is a book to kindle young fancies as riotously as you please: but even elderly people in number are sure to find it out and to lose track of themselves while peering into these gorgeously wild but still firmly coordinated visions of nowhere at all...
...There are magical slippers in Kaspar and the Red Slippers...
...Listen, Children, by Stephen Southivold, with a foreword by John Drinkwater...
...1.50...
...Doubleday) will save the young from the pitfall of social error...
...New York: George H. Doran Company...
...Paul Bunyan and His Great Blue Ox (Doran) retold by Wallace Wadsworth and illustrated by Will Crawford, has an exaggerated humor—of appeal to the sophisticated as well as the unsophisticated child...
...1.00...
...Rabbit and his great abundance of friends and relations...
...and Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter (Frederick Warne and Company...
...His stories are not the breathless romances of battle one used to enjoy under the spell of Captain Reid, but adhere to the best traditions of folk-lore...
...New York: Doubleday, Page and Company...
...Nora Crimmins...
...The Adventurers, by Maurice Francis Egan...
...and there are salutary lessons hidden in the fun and adventure and pathos of the narrative...
...Paul Crowley...
...Y. Crowell and Company) containing Moni the Goat Boy, and other favorites...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Christopher Robin is almost universally known since Milne gave him to the children in When We Were Very Young (Dutton...
...The book is innocuous...
...Boston: Little, Brown, and Company...
...1 HIS will prove a very useful book for teaching English composition in the classroom or at home...
...New York: Dodd, Mead and Company...
...All of which has been attractively illustrated by the artists who have caught the spirit of this argosy of dreams and laughter...
...it is up to me to tell what he did...
...New York: Duffield and Company...
...Skunny Wundy (Doran) by Arthur Parker...
...John and Susanne, by Edith Ballinger Price...
...Of late, older literature has come into such favor as reading-matter for children that something about history and geography, in their classic aspects, is wholly appropriate...
...IF YOU happen to have read another book about Christopher Robin, you will certainly remember that he had a swan who, when you went down beside the pond and called to him, answered to the name of Pooh...
...Sister m Eleanore...
...1.75...
...2.50...
...3.00...
...Boston: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Company...
...1.75...
...To the Heart of the Child, by Josephine Van Dyke Brown-son...
...Patricia and the Other Girls, by Marguerite Murphy...
...To make available at a moderate price the most popular of Parker Fillmore's legends and folk tales of Finland and the Slavic countries which were published several years ago, Wilhelmina Harper, supervisor of children's work of the Kern County, California, library, has selected and edited the most popular of his stories from The Laughing Prince and Mighty Mikko...
...night flights with malicious fairies...
...Hansel and Gretel, of the Brothers Grimm, illustrated by Kay Neilsen (Doran) ; The Donegal Wonder Book (Stokes) by Seumas McManus...
...2.50...
...Daniel's good style and mediaeval atmosphere sufficient recompense for hackneyed plot and characterization...
...There is some sort of silly rumor about that the writing of fairy-tales has entered upon bad days...
...Doolittle's Caravan (Stokes) by Hugh Lofting will delight Dr...
...1.50...
...Not content with his narrative, the poet in Mr...
...The seeds in his child garden are growing splendidly but they are a trifle usual and tame...
...2.00...
...Saint Francis of Assisi, by E. M. Wilmot-Buxton...
...New York: George H. Doran Company...
...1.75...
...Exactly what to bring back for the young mind is at once a task and a responsibility, and it is just here that Orpheus With His Lute, Mr...
...And this is as it should be...
...History lurks in such titles as Everett T. Tomlinson's Book of Pioneers (D...
...Gipsies and Arab gnomes, richly attired, serve their masters of the magic ring at sumptuous repasts...
...The Alhambra, by Washington Irving...
...Chick, His Travels and Adventures (Houghton Mifflin...
...Doolittle's Caravan, by Hugo Lofting...
...To THE HEART OF THE CHILD will present many points of value to the teacher in primary grades who is left with problems of the religious formation of the child...
...For here that delicious thrill that comes from reading of giants, dragons and knights can almost be recaptured by adults...
...Tony Sarg has been fairy godmother to Greenberg, New York publisher...
...New York: Henry Holt and Company...
...Simpler but none the less appealing is a series of Once Upon a Time Stories ($0.50 each)—Hansel and Gretel, Jack the Giant Killer, and other favorites—retold in pictures by W. J. Enright...
...New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...1.75...
...The Magic Flight: Jewish Tales and Legends, by Yossef Gaer...
...In the hands of an imitative youngster, it might lead to new tricks to correct, as Trochee is an inveterate punster, and there is some rather harmless slang used...
...Compton Mackenzie's fable has a moral about being contented with your lot...
...Stories of America, by Eva March Tappan...
...The Captain of the Clothespins, by James Sherman (Little, Brown, and Company) ; The Cock, The Mouse, and The Little Red Hen, by Felicite Lefevre (Macrae Smith...
...Hutchinson's collection of stories from the ancient world of Hellas, seems to fill a need...
...New York: Barse and Hopkins...
...THE fashion of reprints for the "Christmas trade" is one that has a great deal to recommend it...
...G. T. E. OTHER JUVENILE BOOKS: Virginia Lee, by Clara Ingram Judson...
...November 10, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL *5 When yaw are treated as a grownup, you are bewildered and realize that you hare been taken advantage of...
...A Magician of Science, by John Winthrop Hammond...
...Boston: Marshall Jones Company...
...Quite apart from the sumptuous makeup and perennially charming text, the illustrations are a distinguished enough offering to hold the attention...
...There are some really first-rate jingles...
...and Mary E. Clark and Margery Quigley in Etiquette, Jr...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...As we read over these incomparable stories for the tenth time, we have a chance to consider afresh just what ingredients went to make up this peculiar expansion of the heart at one season of the year, which Dickens first among the moderns identified for us...
...It is a familiar comment upon Charles Dickens that he "invented Christmas...
...2.00...
...1.75...
...2.25) and in Michael Williams's Little Brother Francis of Assisi ($1.75) issued by the same publishers...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...It is the gorgeous Roumanian Orient served up for the dream-feasts of boys and girls, enriching their imaginations and giving glow and inspiration to their dreams...
...New York: Dodd, Mead and Company...
...Both books would help to make Christmas memorable...
...Lurton Blassincamb...
...In the Foundling Prince and Other Tales, he follows the old traditions handed down from Roman days of the Dadan empire, so that his kings are always emperors ruling over boyars of mediaeval type...
...1.00...
...2.00...
...for John Martin's Big Book generously fills any vacuum in this direction, supplying histo*y and nature tales, drawings, puzzles, rainy-day games and nonsense jingles—in fact, anything that will hold the infant mind for a brief time...
...Colum's book is a collection of old stories retold for the pleasure of an imagined king who refuses to turn blacksmith excepting on condition that the capturers of the wild horse tell a good tale in payment...
...His warriors and dragons are always rich with delightful ferocity, but his occasional plaintive scenes are almost the best of his work...
...And it is a pity...
...One might go on indefinitely, but since that is impossible, prudence suggests a mere mention of a few specialized ventures into picture books...
...New York: Benziger Brothers...
...For centuries these tales have been sung in the courts of royalty and in lonely desert camps, and today in translation retain all their magic...
...New York: George H. Doran Company...
...Of Indian tales, the season presents a goodly sprinkling...
...The Gauntlet of Dunmore, by Hawthorne Daniel...
...In short, Mr...
...Pooh was a bear of "very little brain" who lived in a forest all by himself under the name of Sanders...
...In Skazki one receives a very good impression of certain aspects of the Russian mind and temperament—childish in the extreme, on the one hand, and morbid and despairing in the extreme, on the other...
...This Singing World, by Louis Untermeyer...
...2.00...
...The author's own sweetly grave philosophy of life smiles through the text, but children past seven years of age will (or ought to) find it a good excuse for staying up late...
...We meet the "anspreeker" with crape streamers from his hat, going from door to door to announce a death, and see the red and white pincushions hanging on the door to tell of a little Hollander come into the world...
...1.75...
...Into almost every page is tucked some neat little lesson that a boy would find more to his liking were it tucked in further still...
...One cannot end a review of Skazki without speaking about the format and make-up of this volume...
...Anybody would fall in love with these Punches and Judys, these portraits of old and new heroes in the land of youngster fun...
...New York: Benziger Brothers...
...But the tales of this collection seem to bear an indebtedness to Barrie...
...The costuming of the myth characters, the interpretation of nature and animals, the often really magnificent grotesquerie of the scenery—all these are present, but they only partly explain the curious, colorful other-worldliness of these drawings...
...To choose the story that you like best is extremely difficult, but personally I liked the ones in which Piglet figured the most prominently...
...1HE VOYAGERS leads one from the earliest legends of Atlantic discoveries to the days of Columbus and Ponce de Leon...
...The Children's Own Book of Letters and Stories, by Maude Burbank Harding...
...The contents of The Treasure Ship are the realization of a splendid idea...
...1.75...
...Milne explains, in his introduction, the title of his new collection of tales of the many droll adventures of Christopher Robin and his animal friends in the forest...
...1.50...
...There must be a thousand-and-one of its type, "for the 'teens," on the market today...
...It enshrines stories that have become part of our early consciousness in all the splendor of bright pictures and handsome bindings...
...pADRAIC COLUM'S book is pure fantasy, eight or ten A fragile fairy-talcs strung on a diaphanous thread of narrative...
...Indeed, two is the beginning of the end"—is part of it...
...The American Boy Stories (Doubleday, Page) ranging in interest from the vikings to the tales of the foreign legion...
...Hans Brinker: or The Silver Skates, by Mary Mapes Dodge...
...2.50...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...She was even impertinent to policemen...
...New York: The Century Company...
...A Year at Miss Austin s, by Ethel Comstock Bridgman...
...0.75 each) are devoted to illustrating classic English rhymes...
...1.50...
...Herbert's play is about a fat king and a thin princess who are ruefully tricked into happiness by a prankful fairy...
...The Story of the Pumpkin Glory, by William Dean Howells, would be a good one to emulate, and such fare would swell the ranks of his child audiences...
...A Boy's-Eye View of the Arctic, by Kennett Rawson...
...Children will admit Inger Johanne to their comradeship without demur, especially because she tells her own story, has many strange things happen to her, and is often blamed for things she did not do...
...Daniel Du Luth, by Everett McNeil...
...Peter Pan has stampeded the imagination of several generations...
...On Land and Sea with Caesar, by R. F. Wells...
...The now well-known Master Christopher Robin of A. A. Milne, has measles and wheezles for our entertainment...
...1.25...
...These are stories with such real places and persons in them that the reader knows they were not invented...
...Skazki: Tales and Legends of Old Russia, by Ida Zeitlin...
...1.25...
...The Treasure Ship: A Collection of Fairy-Tales by Modern Writers, edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith...
...Philadelphia: H. L. Kilner and Company...
...This fine company, under the protection of Christopher, engage in many adventures not the least of which is an expedition to the North Pole...
...Nicholas for three generations of childhood, gave us the story of Hans Brinker: or The Silver Skates, and dedicated it to "the boys and girls of New Amsterdam...
...2.00...
...Whimsical, aery, generously illustrated, these tales abound in delightful conceitB such as this terse prophecy about when the world will come to an end: 26 THE COMMONWEAL November 10, 1926 "When the bird that follows the cuckoo flies into the cuckoo's mouth...
...Boston: Marshall Jones Company...
...A HESE tales are told to two young Jewish children by their grandmother...
...One sees the point more clearly, perhaps, if the half-dozen is selected, and so here goes for a rather arbitrary choice...
...Baltimore: John Murphy...
...2.00...
...So it is quite pertinent that Barrie—who one rainy day had to keep four children amused—should tell them—and us—about the Blot on Peter Pan...
...Hilaire Belloc contributes a typical example of his perfectly turned nonsense verse in A Reproof of Gluttony, and an astonishing simplified and interesting account of The Battle of Crecy that should certainly keep the young idea from thinking history is just nasty old dates and horrid...
...1.50...
...The pictures are in good taste, the figure of the celebrant of the Mass standing beneath the scene in scriptural history that his ceremony typifies...
...1.75...
...Jones's artistry...
...Personifications of the winds are frequent motifs, there are enchanted horses and devils usually in the pious disguise of monks and hermits...
...A map of the forest, drawn by Christopher Robin with the help of Mr...
...Without pointing the dreaded moral, it teaches a degree of science and natural history...
...the little girl whose death brought her parents back to God...
...The longest tale contained in the volume is devoted to the doings of a decidedly lovable little pup who, though elvish, is refreshingly agile...
...Appleton and Company...
...The work of the author has been done with great sympathy and understanding of the child-mind...
...it, too, will be obtuse to two-year-olds...
...Edwin Clark...
...Of course, some of these books were really very good, but the pictures had been left out—and pictures are as necessary to a boy aged ten as they ever were to Michael Angelo himself...
...Mary Rose, Graduate, by Mary Mabel Wirries...
...malaperts and varlets loose clouds of cloth-yard shafts from their trusty self-yew bows...
...Fct-Frumos is the Prince Charming who fights the Zmeii dragons and rescues the Princess Ileane, who is "so lovely that the stars smile upon her—the flower of her hair sings and nine empires listen to the song...
...The author devotes his preface to explaining who the Kootenai Indians are and where their abode may be found...
...2.50...
...1.75...
...Dainty, dimity-covered little books, filled with sketchy drawings pleasurably suggestive, these issues ought to prove that the series can be extended with profit to all...
...Contemporary writers seem apt to go to another extreme and to forget the liking of young people for solid fare on due occasions...
...Here we find ourselves- surrounded by apparently all the Zulus in the world, and all bearing that weapon of untoward fascination, the "assagai...
...Certain exquisite old Persian miniatures, brought to life some season ago in a memorable production at the Hecksher Children's Theatre, gain new meaning after reading the fascinating stories in The Epic of Kings...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...by Irving T. McDonald...
...2.00...
...1.25...
...The pictures are by Elizabeth MacKinstry, who can execute silhouettes with extraordinary deftness and modernity of mood...
...What Happened in the Ark, by Kenneth M. Walker and Geoffrey M. Boumphrey...
...Neur York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...1 HE contents of Zoological Soliloquies bespeak its fantastic character and imaginative interest...
...Boston: Lothrop, Lee and1 Skepard Company...
...Constance Lindsay Skinner's The White Leader (Macmillan...
...Shepard, is provided so you can find your way around without much difficulty...
...New York: Frank-Maurice...
...At least that is how Mr...
...The Brown Castle, by Rebecca Rice...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...The Flying King of Kurio, by William Rose Benet...
...2.50...
...Letters from Uncle Henry, by Henry B. Mason...
...Johnny Gruelle in Beloved Belindy (Volland) introduces new characters with the old favorites, Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy's Mammy...
...LET those wanting to experience again the enchantment received, as a child, from reading fairy-tales and legends, by all means read this book...
...Catholic Nursery Rhymes, by Sister Mary Gertrude...
...and Owl who was always trying to impress them with her wisdom...
...The Dove in the Eagle's Nest, by Charlotte M. Yonge...
...Chrisman's book deserved the John Newbery Medal it received, and deserved also the notable format prepared by the publishers...
...others are based on Old Testament stories...
...The background and the atmosphere go far to keep this unbroken...
...Father Finn's stories are always excellent because they bear the impress of truth...
...The Doran edition, in short, is a publishing event...
...18 THE COMMONWEAL November 10, 1926 BOOKS-FOR THE MORE OR LESS YOUTHFUL JUVENILE BOOKS OF 1926 FROM out of the children's preferences let the selection be made of the best juvenile literature for the almost past year of 1926...
...New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons...
...The Boys' Book of the U. S. Mails, by Irving Crump...
...The young priest who saved a child's soul by teaching her how to swim...
...The result is a work of whimsical fantasy and bookish nonsense-lore that will have strong appeal for the boy and girl who bury themselves in the cushions on wintry nights after dinner...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...Written with an appealing simplicity and a decided sense of word-beauty, it stimulates the adult imagination that may limp, while satisfying that same quality of thought which is so markedly inherent in all children...
...It will engross the child-mind in a profitable and instructive game of snipping and pasting together attractive scenes, in color, of indoor and outdoor life...
...Its readers will enjoy the story because of its picnics and proms and athletic contests which are so thoroughly enjoyed by the charming girls in the story...
...These twelve tales are each distinct, yet there is a certain continuity about them that holds them together...
...1.75...
...A WELL-KNOWN authority on children's books has ques-¦**¦ tioned, in a recent and very delightful article, what "surprises" the coming season may present...
...They travel in a very modernized fantasy-land...
...Boston: H ought on Mifflin Company...
...1.25...
...THE traditions of the Grimm Brothers, de Perrault and the folk-story tellers of England and Ireland are well continued in the work of the Roumanian author, Petre Ispirescu (1830-1887) a modest, humble citizen of Bucharest, devoted to his national craftsmanship of printing and publishing the literature of his people...
...Valery Carrick's Picture Folk Tales (Stokes...
...Peter Pan and Wendy, retold by May Byron from the story of J. M. Barrie...
...In most of these legends there is constant repetition of the same paragraphs which, after awhile, become monotonous...
...2.50...
...Thus the season advances, and the year records among its favorites those of the old which have endured and reappear in new dress, and those of the new which have the merit of good writing, and are within the comprehension of the child...
...The book has the garb, but not the stuff, of reality...
...Treasure Hunters of Bob's Hill, by Charles Pierce Burton...
...November 10, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 19 BOOKS WITH PICTURES IN THERE was a time when mail-order catalogues and fashion plates interested young readers more than books they were confidently expected to devour...
...A Year at Miss Austin's is a story of girls' lives in boarding-school written for girls of high-school age...
...Hammond's standard biography of the great electrician and mathematician, the attempt to "talk down to" the boy results in thin generalities and milky sentiments...
...Certainly one of the most elaborate books of the season is Hansel and Gretel and Other Stories, by the Brothers Grimm, illustrated by Kay Nielsen (New York: George H. Doran Company, $5.00...
...Orpheus With His Lute, by W. M. L. Hutchinson...
...Making the Eleven at St...
...The New Moon, by Cornelia Meigs...
...1.50...
...A Boy of Old Quebec, by Orson Robbins...
...the danger of indiscriminate reading...
...She attempts by various methods to kill her, and when all has failed, the stepmother falls down and-dies...
...The early writers for the young, the creators of Miss Edge-worth's Frank, Sandford, and Merton, or Little Henry and His Bearer, were rather a grim lot...
...Twelve lovely illustrations by Theodore Nadejen, six in black and gold, and six in color, liven up and beautify the pages...
...Father Donoghue's verse is direct and simple enough for very young children...
...and James Willard Schultz's William Jackson, Indian Scout (Houghton Mifflin Company) prove the most striking...
...Because of his lingering affection for his sleek white friend of the past, when he acquired a new colleague all brown and furry, a bear, he dubbed him Winnie-the-Pooh...
...they simply happened to be discovered by Father Finn before the reader came along...
...Animals never cease to fascinate, and Dr...
...The illustrations by Henry Pitz are admirable...
...But children, if they love a story, seem never to grow tired of hearing it repeated—a joy apparently lost when one grows older...
...There is also a chapter on magazine-making...
...and, in the end, a return to an anxious mother...
...Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company...
...2.50...
...Be that as it may, Mr...
...Particularly in the relating do these Russian tales and legends seem to differ quite radically from the folk-lore most familiar to-American children...
...There are attractive illustrations and chapter headings, by Wilfred Jones, all eloquent of the sea...
...Schooner Ahoy...
...The Zulu Trail, by Major Charles Gilson...
...The Enchanted Peafowl, which tells how that bird, who had been a princess before she was bewitched, married the czar's youngest son and became a queen...
...Red Howling Monkey (Macmillan) by Helen Damrosch Tee-Van...
...Montrose J. Moses's Another Treasury of Plays for Children (Little, Brown) will prove readable and actable...
...There is a remarkably exciting plot, and Polly's secret is not divulged until she has won the warm affection of every one of the new friends Miss Nash has made for her...
...Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company...
...Still, they have not been accepted too thoroughly...
...1.50...
...Let him have a few plants that will, like wild morning-glories, climb the tops of the bean poles...
...New York: The Century Company...
...New York: Frank-Maurice...
...Prester John, by John Buchan...
...2.00...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...1.75...
...The story is an unimaginative rehashing of the usual fairytale, inheriting enough from its worthy forebears to make it readable (the beautiful princess is enchanted by her cruel aunt who is not invited to the christening, and later is un-enchanted by the love of the handsome prince who comes adventuring...
...It should be placed in the hands of every instructor in our catechetical system...
...T. W. 28 THE COMMONWEAL November 10, 1926 The Enchanted Flivver, by Bertonon Braiey...
...Nice............dream Mice............cream...
...There was also the sense of a possible loneliness through unforeseen accident, at a time all the rest of the world is foregathering to mike merry, which, in a heart that the world has left intact, only increases a sense of fellowship with its fellows, unseen and unknown...
...Chiquita, and A Mother's Heart, by Henriette Eugenie Delamare...
...when you are tmted as an infant, your pride is hurt...
...and What Happened in the Ark, by Kenneth Walker and Geoffrey Boumphrey (Dutton) relating how all the animals lived happily together until one hot afternoon when the magpie told them she had seen, over the hills, an old man with a white beard, building an ark...
...It means he bad the name over the door in gold letters, and lived under it...
...It is an excellent instructional device, and will have its appeal for Sunday-school teachers whose pupils are in the lower grades...
...Nielsen employs the most effective elements of Scandinavian fantasy...
...with pansies and sheep and the moon —with gobblers and pirates and pigtails...
...John M. Kenny, Jr...
...Moreover, it deals delightfully with all sorts and conditions of things that are 24 THE COMMONWEAL November 10, 1926 familiar and cherished...
...When I first heard his name I said, just as you are going to say, 'But I thought he was a boy.' 'So did I,' said Christopher Robin...
...New York: The Century Company...
...Any child who would refuse to register excitement just before Chieh Chung finally rebottles the mischievous Shen must have been born near Plymouth, Vermont...
...Eeyore, the complaining donkey who, by comparison, makes Pooh seem to have a perfectly enormous brain...
...This sentiment is strongest in the story which gives the present collection its title, a tale of a lonely and unhappy traveler, driven for company (and excellent company it proves) upon the humble servants of the inn where he is snow-bound...
...New York: Benziger Brothers...
...and Mighty Mikko, the story of the young son of a woodsman who befriended a fox and through his good graces became rich and powerful and married the king's daughter, are perhaps the two best stories of the selection...
...so will Spyri's Stories of Swiss Children (T...
...Mother Goose has an interest in Sarah Addington's Pudding Lane People (Little, Brown, and Company) where one meets Old King Cole and the Queen of Hearts...
...The book includes letters, poems, short stories, book reviews, and plays, and gives exercises on punctuation, and the appropriate choice of words, entertainingly arranged in the form of games...
...The same publishers issue Jason and the Princess ($1.50) a tale of marvels and adventure by Kathleen Colvile, ornamented with rather curious drawings by Albert Rutherston...
...New York: The Viking Press...
...For older boys and girls, and for many whose adolescence has been left behind for years, The Last Days of Pompeii, in a handsome new edition, with pictures and decorations in color, should prove a welcome Christinas addition to the bookshelf...
...New York: Longmans, Green and Company...
...There are stories by John Galsworthy, Cynthia Asquith, J. M. Barrie, Denis Mackail, P. G. Wodehouse, Compton Mackenzie, Algernon Blackwood, Mary Webb, and Adelaide Phillpotts...
...But it invests all the others—The Seven Poor Travelers, which is, in its homely fashion, a sermon against international hatred...
...Martha Bayard...
...It is out of place in the midst of much stimulating beauty...
...Of course, there is the exotic emperor, Dunsany, too...
...Galsworthy's tale is different—having something of his typical humanitarian appeal in his expression of freedom...
...Incidentally, we assist at a pleasant little story of a poor family restored to happiness by a great doctor's skill and left as happy as we insist all good families must be left—at Christmas anyhow...
...He could introduce, however, a more original type of imagination and humor into his works...
...It is compounded of all sorts of obscure ingredients...
...Boston: Little, Brown, and Company...
...New York: Benziger Brothers...
...Frankfort and Jacob Streets, New York City The Little Blue Man, by Giuseppe Fandulli...
...New York: Samuel Gabriel Sons and Company...
...The Supercilious Camel, the Woggle Bug, the Oyster Bed, the Wistful Elephant, My Giraffinity, and the Flamingolosh, scattered over bizarre colored pages with erratic drawings, present a work that will fill the wonder-world of the younger children with a vibration of joy and astonishment...
...New York: Benziger Brothers...
...New York: Albert and Charles Boni...
...30 THE COMMONWEAL November 10, 1926 L PPRINTING SERVICE Our working force is composed of trained men, selected because of their ability and willingness to make extreme efforts to satisfy our customers...
...The delightful A. P. Herbert, the master of Punch, is represented by a short play about the Fat King Melon and Princess Caraway...
...Fillmore Folk Tales, selected by WUhelmina Harper...
...Most of them are well worth describing, although too much of Skunny Wundy at a time might be a little tiresome...
...The Boy Who Knew What the Birds Said was originally published in 19x8...
...An Old-Fashioned Girl, by Louisa M. Alcott...
...Pudding Lane People, by Sarah Addington...
...Bostoni Houghton Mifflin Company...
...In Gipsy Nan, a story of a very winsome little girl's summer holiday on the shores of Lake Superior, Miss Rankin has given us another of her very charming and wholesome tales for young girls, something in the happily remembered vein of Mrs...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...A PPARENTLY fairy-tales and fantasies of sort are -iV getting to be of such import that they are collected yearly along with the other best cullings in diverse activities...
...2.00...
...Will Crawford's pictures help out, and they are very good pictures indeed...
...1.00...
...This swank had such influence on Neil's godfather that Peter Pan was blotted in creation and turned out cocky...
...Williams's book, well-known to readers of The Commonweal, is an effective restatement for children of many wise and lovely stories about the Poverello...
...New York: Frederick Warne and Company...
...1.50...
...Scattered through the book are numerous charming black and white sketches that give a connection to the stories through the eye...
...New York: Benziger Brothers...
...Apart altogether from its commercial aspect, it may well be considered as a tribute paid to literature that has been stamped with the approval of a generation that has grown to manhood or womanhood without finding anything much better, and which is anxious that the generation to follow shall not miss the well-remembered thrill that comes with a first reading...
...From choice, a child, be he of the country, or the city, loves the fairies...
...But nothing that has been written since has shaken the reputation of the author of The Last Days of Pompeii for scholarship or power of making one of the most tragic incidents of history vivid and convincing...
...The First Christmas, by Thomas A. Donogkue...
...1.75...
...Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company...
...Mary Webb brings Prince Charming to the assistance of Elfina, whose father was charging her with being "dreamy and stupid and plain and careless...
...But later on he contradicts himself and says that the Pooh part of the bear's name came from his habit of blowing away the bees who liked to alight on his rather long nose...
...There is the acute sense of contrast in which no one has ever excelled the author of the Pickwick Papers, the sharp difference between "inwdeness" and "outsideness"— the long journey by road through cold and storm which remained a vivid memory, from his early days of political reporting, set against the warm wayside hostelry, with its snug parlors, roaring fires, general good cheer, and the welcome which no payment of a bill could ever discharge...
...Boys are still as fond as ever of wigwams and tomahawks...
...Laura Benet...
...New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company...
...0.20...
...All the birds know that, but not all the people know it...
...You can accept either explanation...
...From slightly earlier publications, Marie, Queen of Rou-mania's Naughty Kildeen (Stokes) might be included...
...The stories are dramatic in the telling and abound in humor and imagination...
...Kanga and her squeaky Baby Roo...
...all of Padraic Colum's books, particularly Children's Homer, illustrated by Willy Pogany (Macmillan) The Forge in the Forest, with pictures by Boris Artzybashieff (Macmillan) and The Voyagers, with pictures by Wilfrid Jones (Macmillan) can be selected without hesitancy...
...WHY must people be intrigued by their own cleverness...
...Thomas Walsh...
...For the children he now turns on the magic stereopticon, and outlines a world of wonderment borrowed from the older fairy literature, the modern folk versions, and the stage and film craft that are overcoming the vision of all our young people...
...There is plenty of nature and fishing and camping, carnivals and pony races to delight youth-iul readers and while away the quiet hours at the hearthside...
...1 HIS little booklet ia verse tells the story of Bethlehem with colored scenes which are completed by a picture of the crib in the parish church...
...The daily life in Bloomfield on the Kennebec, that is Polly's home, the inn, and the academy, "one of the finest educational institutions of the state," are drawn with a pen that knows how to make the past live...
...A word must be said for the illustrations in line and color, by Ernest H. Shepard, which adorn the sheaf of Christmas stories by the man who cared most for Christmas...
...over twelve, Lewis Carroll...
...Martha Jane at College, by Inez Specking...
...This is almost the same tale as that told by the Brothers Grimm in Snow-White...
...Boston: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Company...
...1.50...
...The Story of Jesus, by Ethel Nathalie Dana...
...The publishers would scarcely be without their rights were they to recommend it for "ages, six to eighty...
...New York: Albert and Charles Boni...
...The illustrations by Miriam Sells are delightfully in keeping with the text of this pleasant book, Enid Hurd...
...All of them contain a great deal of gentle wisdom, and are set against a background of Jewish family life, giving an interesting glimpse into the customs and holidays of the race...
...The antics of this rarely clever and crazy household of animals of which the benignant and heavy Dr...
...Greenberg deserves to be introduced to all those who can be classed as not too old young people...
...Lovers of children at their games, and those in charge in the nurseries will welcome the interest awakened in this House We Live In...
...2.00...
...Each story has^ a moral, but it is one symbolical and implied rather than expressed...
...New York: Benziger Brothers...
...The Wonder Offering, by Marion Ames Taggart...
...A Mother's Heart is another story with a moral lesson prettily disguised in narrative...
...There is every type of girl in Miss Austin's, just as in every boarding-school...
...To the poetry-loving child, Proud Sir Pirn, by Hugh Chester-man (D...
...In the new Scribner edition with quaint Dutch end papers and bright colored plates by Charles Wharton Edwards, Mary Mapes Dodge's tale of two brave little Dutch children keeps all its old charm and offers us a multitude of new...
...The seventh hundredth anniversary of Saint Francis of Assisi has not been overlooked in the children's books, and the Saint who is known as "everybody's" is presented in fascinating texts by Ethel Mary Wilmot-Buxton's Saint Francis of Assisi (Stokes) and Michael Williams's Little Brother Francis of Assisi (Macmillan...
...Lucy Fitch Perkins's Mr...
...In A Magician of Science, a boy's life of Steinmetz based upon Mr...
...1.75...
...If one follows these discriminating judges, and begins with the tiniest tot, one will select Felicite Lefevre's Soldier Boy, with illustrations by Tony Sarg (Greenberg...
...Chiquita is the name of a little Spanish girl, who is possessed of a beautiful voice and becomes a famous singer, only to discover that the price she has paid for fame is too great...
...Bubbleloon, by Edith Keeley Stokely...
...How well modern publishers have come to realize the fact may be seen from a cursory glance through any random half-dozen of their better offerings...
...By the critic's intention and the general trend of thought on children's literature, we may make "surprises" synonymous with "values...
...The present book is both a reward and a find...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Polly's Secret, by Harriet A. Nash...
...2.00...
...T. C. November 10, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 27 BRIEFER MENTION The House We Live In...
...1.00...
...The whimsical wit, grace and imagination of When We Were Very Young are again evidenced in these stories and his verses, and the fanciful drawings of Mr...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...New York: George H. Doran Company...
...But, in reading the story to the "littlest people," stop just before the last sentence...
...Toto and the Gift, by Katharine Adams...
...In these Russian legends many more references to God and religion are made than in the usual fairy-tale...
...3.00) has to do with the nature-lore of the Senecas...
...1.50...
...There is no apparently necessary end to the list of such stories...
...but to quote Robin: "Winnie-the-Pooh...
...King Curius was very lax as a ruler, spent all his time reading periodicals, and if it had not been that his cook was trying so awfully hard to make "lemon sponge," his kingdom would have been sacked and ruined by the barbarians...
...and The American Twins (Houghton Mifflin) combine history and travel in a fiction form...
...3.00...
...these are not strangers to us, but old friends whom we passed in the crowd and recognized only after Father Finn had pointed them out to us...
...He's Winnie-ther-Pooh...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...1.75One Boy Too Many, by Lebbeus Mitchell...
...Zoological Soliloquies, with rhymes by Kay Harshberger, music by Holland Robinson, and drawings by Mac Harshberger...
...First published in 1882 in a translation by Helen Zimmern from the French of Jules Mohl, these tales of splendor of the East are republished from the old edition, now out of print, in a dazzling setting provided by Mr...
...BENET has read much, and his touch on the fantastic has already been recognized as effective and creative...
...M ISS TAGGART'S little book for children, instructing them in the mystery of the Mass, is done with her usual charm...
...1.75...
...But this large book, amply illustrated with colored plates and drawings in black and white by several artists, with large type and an array of headliners in the field of fancy, is the second book of edited tales for the young idea that Lady Asquith has published...
...1.50...
...12.00...
...All will hail his new book, Winnie-the-Pooh (Dutton) with delight...
...On Shining Wings, which is of the stuff of adventure and nature, is such a book...
...New York: George H. Doran Company...
...On the other hand, The Zulu Trail is a real thriller...
...New York: The Century Company...
...New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company...
...Inger Johanne's Lively Doings, by Dikken Zwilgmeyer, translated by Em'die Poulsson...
...Jason and the Princess, by Kathleen Colvile...
...Many of the same stories were undoubtedly told by people who had drifted from Russia to the Teutonic countries, or from the Teutonic countries to Russia, in each case the tale becoming engrafted with something of the^ spirit characteristic of the nation in which it was adopted...
...As with all the gift books that Scribner's issue yearly, the colored plates by F. C Yohn are worthy of the book's reputation and of the fine topography and binding that embody this new edition...
...Boston: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Company...
...1.75...
...Gordon, by Sara Cone Bryant...
...This happy book closes with the deft and spirited verses of Katherine Tynan...
...2.00...
...One can well imagine a reader, nourished upon the naturalistic novel of the ancient world, which began with SaJammbo, a little impatient with Lytton's somewhat stilted style, and the contrast between paganism and the new evangel introduced in the person of Olinthus...
...It all became clear in this chronicle of Neil, who had one fairy godmother who was a bad fairy...
...His collection of Roumanian tales, published in 1862, 1872, 1874, 1879, was followed by a History of the Turco-Russian War of 1876...
...They cannot, like the little girl found crying in a corner, say: "There is so little variety in my life...
...The Boy Who Knew What the Birds Said, by Padraic C«lum...
...Imagine a youngster who asks the kind of questions represented by the immemorial "What makes the moon round...
...2.25...
...R. Caldecott's Picture Books (New York: Frederick Warne and Company...
...listening to a gentle Chinaman's embroidered accounts of how things like printing and china came to be...
...The size and everything else is so admirable that one regrets the seeming indifference of these books to whether or not they are opened...
...Wonder Tales from Windmill Lands, by Frances Jenkins Olcott...
...Then you can't call him Winnie.' 'I don't...
...The sugar-coating was apt to be thin and the pill of edification dense and bitter...
...Candles Beams, by Francis J. Finn...
...asked Christopher Robin...
...Possibly the undertone of thinking in the manner of Lao-Tse may escape younger readers, but there is really not so much of it as the publishers' announcement seems to think...
...1.75...
...The pictures are by Charles Livingston Bull, whose style is sufficiently well-known, and one's only regret is that there are so few—even if the number is ample in a book designed to sell at a low price...
...HUGO LOFTING'S peculiarly active series of books has, as its latest addition, this Caravan which, wonderful to relate, is not in the slightest degree a disappointment...
...I confess to liking him better as an illustrator than as a designer, but that is no great matter...
...2.00...
...Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company...
...Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...The Gauntlet of Dunmore is a narrative in the romantic mood, laid in the early fifteenth century...
...Skunny Wundy, by Arthur C. Parker (New York: George H. Doran Company...
...He has humor, an understanding of nature and a love for bright color...
...By comparison, a thread of sly Mark Twain fun appears glittering here and there, thus attracting and fascinating older readers...
...For the serious child, Lorinda M. Bryant's Celebrated Towers (Century) is informative and interesting...
...Yeomen whack one another on the noddles with quarterstaffs...
...Upon the sheet of ice to which December turns the canals and waterways between Brock and Leyden, we watch the cheery figures in their bright outlandish costumes swinging along upon all sorts of errands, grave and gay, and have an opportunity, chapter by chapter, to study that cabinet of curiosities that Holland will never cease to present to the traveler, old or young, through the chatter and gossip of a party of young people...
...The book is so beautifully gotten up and arranged that one almost feels that it is too costly for children to possess...
...They visit the toy factory of Santa Claus, Incorporated, go down to Davey Jones's locker in an elevator, and stop off at the Grimm Brothers' mavie emporium for an all-star program...
...The Foundling Prince and Other Tales, translated by Julia Cottier Harris and Rea Ipcar from the Roumanian of Petre Ispirescu...
...After having read so many books that contain an involved style, it is a perfect joy to find tales told in this simple, rather beautiful manner...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Boston: Little, Brown, and Company...
...The most recent offering is Tony Sarg's Alphabet ($1.00) a treasure of color and design extravaganza with just the right sort of verses thrown in for good measure...
...Gipsy Nan, by Carroll W. Rankin...
...The Little Pig That Would Not Get Up, by Edna Groff Deih.1...
...Danger never flags from the opening chapters in an old house— haunted, of course—down in Cornwall, to the later development of the plot in the Loangwa valley of Africa during the days of the slave trade...
...The story tells in simple language the high adventures of Peter Pan and Wendy in the Never-Land: fights with, pirates who do not frighten...
...Let your children encourage it...
...Readers who chanced upon The Flying Carpet, with its original contributions by Hardy and Barrie and others, found a beautiful book for children and were doubtlessly themselves, if they dipped within its covers, enchanted with the sly conceits and pawky humors...
...1.25...
...Also living in this forest were Piglet, whose grandfather's name was Trespasser "W," short for Trespassers Will...
...November 10, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 21 Winnie-The-Pooh, by A. A. Milne...
...1.10...
...I wish the short glimpse of the Island of the Screaming Horses could have been omitted...
...0 .25...
...Catalogs, Magazines, Books, Commercial Printing BURR PRINTING HOUSE Cor...
...New York: The CenytuCempvny, $2.00...
...the mirror every day and finds that her daughter is more comely than herself...
...1.50...
...It is all here, the delicate touch, the vivid imagery of that delightful intravert, Sir James Barrie...
...But if a youngster is precocious enough to understand puns involving "light-haired" and "light-heired," the humor springing from the illogical arguments of Chinese metaphysicians, and the correct meaning of such words as "duplicity," "tatamount," "phlebotomize," and a host of others, he will be too precocious to listen to the story they develop...
...New York: George H. Doran Company...
...2.50...
...The silhouettes by Else Hasselriis are enough to give anybody the wanderlust...
...What does 'under the name' mean...
...The story of the little giri, fifty-six years ago, who on hearing of his death, asked whether we "should ever have Christmas again," may or may not be authentic But the publication by Scribner's of the group of Christinas stories that fint i^petred from year to year in Household Word* when Ae great writer was its editor, comes to remind us how deathless is hit association with what we hare grown to consider the Christinas spirit...
...William Jackson, Indian Scout, by James Willard Shulte...
...Mr, Pickles and the Party, by Constance Heward...
...We learn how Gerard Douw went half blind with painting at forty and was restored to vision by an old (jerman woman's spectacles, how an English philosopher peeled a $1,600 tulip under the impression it was an onion...
...Of course, it was Ah Mee, son of the patient and only once irate carver Ching Chi, who spread black jam over engraved plaques and so enabled his parent to make an impression on the wall when he started throwing things...
...2.50...
...Chrisman has merely selected a number of the best and made them very entertaining indeed...
...This gives the feeling that the tales were really spoken first before they were written—an impression ideally suited for children, who much prefer to have stories told or read to them, rather than read them themselves...
...Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...As told in this latest collection, they make a book that any adult not erudite enough to go to original sources will enjoy, and in which those lucky adolescents who have their life before them will find abundant incentive to encourage them toward first-hand acquaintance with the treasure-house of Greek literature...
...A most likable, though at times exasperating, child is Inger Johanne, a child who runs breathlessly around corners in the fond hope of flying into a fairy kingdom and is not really disappointed when she meets the same old realities of every-day life...
...Molesworth...
...they are not as yet known along with the Best Sermons and Best News Stories...
Vol. 5 • November 1926 • No. 1
