Living With Books

...As I shall point out in due course...

...Over the years I have acquired a great variety of anthologies, and these not only provide pleasure in varying degrees but on occasion serve a researcher's purpose...

...That leaves a gap of thirty years, and for many purposes my set is obsolete...

...I hope now to be able to check my guesses...

...My French and German dictionaries go back to college years...

...I wonder why Dr...

...Finally, there is an adequate note on expressionism but nothing whatever about existentialism...

...The only test of a reference book lies in the use that can he made of it, and 1 have not had the Companion long enough to decide how well it serves my particular purposes...

...The first edition of this work, edited by James D. Hart, now chairman of the English department at the University of California, appeared in 1941...

...One of my perennial problems, again both as reviewer and as a'reader of manuscripts, is the contemporary writer whose books I haven't read...

...He could not, I grant, do less if the volume is to be worthy of its name, and yet I have at least half a dozen hooks in any one of which I could find such information as he gives...

...and if the Companion isn't perfectly adapted to m\ needs, that doesn t prove that it won't serve somebody else's...

...That is why I am delighted to find on my desk a review copy of the third (revised and enlarged) edition of The Oxford Companion to American Literature, which sells for $10...

...I would have a more recent encyclopedia if I could afford one, but I wouldn't give up the one I have...

...If I ever find myself poring over this section of the book, it will be because I want to find out about somebody like Alice Morse Earle, Theophilus Eaton, Harry Stillwell Edwards, Emma Embury, Daniel Emmett, Nathaniel Evans or Alexander Exqnemelin...

...Again and again, both as a reviewer and as a publisher's adviser, I have to try to decide whether an author...

...Although I am constantly bewildered both by what is and what is not in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, which I have owned for a long time, and in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, a more recent acquisition, I couldn't keep house without one or the other, and sometimes it's nice to have both...

...Last year a First Supplement was published, edited by Mr...

...s I have said, everything depends mi what the indi\vidual wants to use a reference book for...

...perhaps a biographer, perhaps an historical novelist is playing fast and loose with facts, and if his subject is connected with the American past the DAB usually gives me what I want...

...Its special feature, the dating of words, is usually interesting rather than important, but there have been times in the past when, in order to find when a particular word was first used, I have gone to a library to consult the multi-volumed Oxford English Dictionary, on which the Universal is based...

...Even such marginal use, however, is not to be sneered at: I rarely refer to the Readers' Encyclopedia, but once or twice it has been a lifesaver...

...1 refer most frequently to Volume III, which contains bibliographies of more than 200 individual authors as well as many excellent topical bibliographies...

...In the few months I have had it, I have turned to it first whenever I wanted to look up a word, just to see how it worked out, and it seems to serve my purposes, though in most instances no better than my old Webster would have done...

...It is a valuable work in many ways, but for me it has a special utility...

...There are summaries of perhaps a dozen novels whose titles begin with E, among them Louis Bromfield's Early Autumn, Ben Hecht's Erik Dorn, Irving Bacheller's Eben Holden, and Henry Adams's Esther...

...There are other books that I use more or less frequently...

...An even more elementary requirement is a dictionary but what dictionary...

...I have an aged Roget's Thesaurus, which has done duty for thirty years, and my copy of Fowler's Modern English Usage is almost as old and quite as well worn...

...In addition to biographies of men and women of letters, summaries of individual works, identifications of characters in novels and plays, and comments on literary movements, there is a good deal of material that is not strictly belletristic but is intended to illuminate the social and intellectual backgrounds of American literature...

...There are other books I ought to mention...

...Reading novels in manuscript, as I constantly do, I have often been bothered by words and phrases I believed, but could not prove, to be anachronisms...

...From the time I was in college I wanted .1 set of the Encyclopaedia Brilannica...

...Hart devotes approximately a page to each...

...It seems a curious assortment...

...An even more recent acquisition, so recent that I have scarcely had a chance to look at it, is the one-volume edition of A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles, edited by Mitford M. Mathews...

...Every writer who works at home tries to collect the hooks he needs most, for, no matter how convenient a public or a university library may be, one wants to have the desired information where-one can lay hands on it...

...Also, in recent years, for the sake of scrabble, though nothing exposes the inevitable arbitrariness of all desk dictionaries more quickly than scrabble and anagrams...

...In poetry I can see that Longfellow's Evangeline was a natural choice, but a summary of bis "Excelsior" scarcely seems indispensable...

...Since I have never had unlimited funds for books, and since in any case I have a prejudice, common to book reviewers and all others connected with the trade, against paying for books, and certainly against paying list prices for them, my reference library has grown in a haphazard fashion...

...It is, I suspect, a book that I shall enjoy picking up and looking through, but here, even more than with the Oxford Universal, the great value for me lies in the dating of words...

...Webster's Biographical Dictionary, in view of the other books on my shelves, isn't particularly useful, but the Geographical Dictionary I have found handier than any atlas I have owned...

...A friend gave me a copy of the 1925 edition of Webster's New International Dictionary soon after it was published, and that has been my principal authority ever since, although I have supplemented it with a series of desk dictionaries, for convenience in handling and for the sake of newer words...

...the redoubtable 11th edition published in 1910...

...It has never seemed necessary to buy each successive volume of Who's Who in America, but I find it advantageous to have every third or fourth issue available...

...In my own field, I have The Cambridge History of English Literature but, alas, in the cheap edition of 1933, which has no bibliographies...

...but I use it constantly...

...Browsing through the Companion, trying to estimate its usefulness, I can see some of the problems the editor faced...

...Hart's hardest decisions must have concerned the selection of books to be summarized...

...Leaving belles lettres, I wonder what value there is in brief biographies of Albert Einstein and Dwight D. Eisenhower...

...But my situation does differ from the norm in the degree of inconvenience involved, for the only large library to which I have access is 22 miles from where I live...

...One of Dr...

...Recently, like thousands of others, I have fallen for the Book-of-the-Month Club's big giveaway, the Oxford Universal Dictionary...

...Van Wyck Brooks's Makers and Finders also serves as a reference work, although it is much more than that...

...Then there is Literary History of the United States, written by a number of scholars and published in three volumes in 1948...

...I bought it at a contributor's discount and have never been sorry...

...the second in 1943...

...I have various books that cover parts of the same ground, and it may be that I will continue to turn to these volumes first and will resort to the Companion only if they fail me...

...Among the books I have long had an eye on are the various companions to literature and other arts published by the Oxford University Press, but I have not been able to convince myself that I ought to spend cash for them...

...plus the three supplementary volumes published in 1922 and the three published in l926...

...hut it wasn't until the early Thirties that I picked up a second-hand set of the so-called 13th edition that is...

...In these volumes are essential biographical and bibliographical data and, if one cares, many extraordinary self-revelations...

...Kunitz and Vineta Colby, adding new authors and bringing the old ones up to date...

...It is rich in material on literature and all the other arts before 1910 richer than subsequent editions, probably because they had to devote more space to science and there is a vast amount of other information that is not outdated...

...Take, for example, because they are not too numerous, the entries under the letter E. The major figures whose names begin with that letter are Jonathan Edwards, T. S. Eliot and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Dr...

...anyone interested in science, for instance, would find it useless...

...The World Almanac, on the other hand, is indispensable...

...For me The Dictionary of American Biography is a luxury but, like many luxuries, a pleasant thing to have...

...This, then, is the company into which I am introducing the Companion to American Literature, not knowing how much I shall use it but confident that a time will come when it is the very thing I need...

...LIVING WITH BOOKS A Sampling of Literary Reference Works Accumulated Over 20 Years By Granville Hicks HICKS Having lived and worked in the country for the past 20 years and more, I have of necessity built up my own reference library...

...A chronological index, which appears at first glance to be excellent, lists the events of literary history and those of social history in parallel columns...

...My chief recourse, ever since it was published in 1942, has been Twentieth Century Authors, edited by Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Hay-craft...

...Hart summarized Faulkner's Soldiers" Pay, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary, but nothing that has appeared since 1931...

...Looking further...

...I remember, for example, having been able to make something of the fact that the word "socialism" was first used in 1839...

...The present edition runs to 890 pages, and there are several thousand entries...

...As a contributor, I have had bestowed on me a dozen issues of Funk and Wagnalls's New International Year Book and half a dozen of the World Scope Year Book, but neither set has proved to be of great value...

...I may as well admit that this was acquired by way of another book club, the Readers' Subscription...