Paper backs for Christmas
UNTERECKER, JOHN
By John Unterecker Paperbacks for Christmas WHICH of the paperbacks published during the last year might make good stuffing for a book-lover's Christmas stocking? 1957 was a bonanza year for the...
...In each volume, selections from the philosophers are interspersed with analytical comment...
...There are dozens of other books I would like to mention, ranging all the way from George Philip Krapp's fine verse translation of Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida (Modern Library Paperback, $.95) to Beacon's reissue, under the title Scott s Last Expedition ($1.95), of those tragic journals of Captain R. F. Scott which eloquently record the events of his second and fatal Antarctic expedition...
...Art has never been very successfully transferred to the paperbacks...
...William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain (New Directions Paperbook, 11.25) and two extremely interesting anthologies edited by Perry Miller, The American Puritans and The American Transcendentalists (Anchor, $1.25 each), should head the list...
...Volume I comprises the complete texts of The Mikado, H. M. S. Pinafore, The Gondoliers, Patience, Princess Ida and The Grand Duke...
...Other anthologies which might well serve the holiday season are Oscar Williams's The Silver Treasury of Light Verse (Mentor, $.50), R. P. Falk's very funny collection of American parody and satire, The Antic Muse (Evergreen, $1.45), and Donald Hall, Robert Pack and Louis Simpson's brilliant collection of poetry by writers under 40, The New Poets of England and America (Meridian, $1.45...
...Though there have been several paperback editions of Moby Dick, both abridged and unabridged, and even one comic-book version, the rest of Melville has been relatively hard to come by in inexpensive editions...
...Two sets recently published would make fine gifts for the reader interested in a sampling of the major philosophers...
...And, lest Gilbert and Sullivan fans feel left out in the Christmas cold, Saint Martin's Press offers a two-volume set of The Savoy Operas ($1.25 each...
...The second two, From Descartes to Locke and Berkeley, Hume and Kant, sell for $1.75...
...For those inclined especially to improvisation, Grove Press has published Andre Hodeir's Jazz, Its Evolution and Essence (Evergreen, $1.45), which traces the history of jazz from its inception to the death of Charlie Parker in March 1955...
...The pages are in most cases tooi small for good reproduction...
...Phoenix Books' Philosophers Speak for Themselves series offers somewhat longer selections, dips farther back into the past, and is considerably more expensive than the Mentor set...
...Hauser's two volumes trace the relationship between the artist and his society from the prehistoric era to the baroque period...
...But there simply isn't space for everything...
...Miller's anthologies, assembling sermons, poems and essays from such of our most articulate ancestors as Cotton Mather, Edward Taylor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau, let that past speak for itself...
...Volumes I and II of Arnold Hauser's monumental The Social History of Art ($1.25 each) were published by Vintage Books, and Volume I of Elizabeth G. Holt's A Documentary History of Art ($1.45) was published by Anchor...
...Let's start with the American scene...
...1957 was a bonanza year for the soft-cover books, and of the hundreds of good titles published I have been able to review only about fifty...
...the cost of plates often forces the publisher into none-too-successful offset processes...
...In reprinting in one volume Sergei Eisenstein's Film Form and The Film Sense, Meridian Books makes a first-rate double feature available to a wide audience...
...More important than the fact that famous men wrote them, though, is the fact that the essays are remarkably readable, written for—not down to—-mature minds...
...And for those who want a pocket guide to everything Western, there is This Is the West (Signet, $.35), a combination history, sightseer's manual, cookbook and bibliography...
...And what of modern America...
...Holt's book is a wonderful companion volume to Hauser...
...Both of these books, though hardly cheerful Christmas presents, should lead their readers to some sober New Year's resolutions...
...The best of Thoreau is also available in The Portable Thoreau (Viking, $1.45), which offers all of Walden and a generous selection from the letters, essays and poems...
...Grove Press, in reprinting White Jacket ($1.45), Melville's great novel of the horrors of life on a 19thcentury man-of-war, and Pierre ($2.45), his grim study of that handsome innocent whose marriage to his own illegitimate sister led inexorably to murder and tragic death, has performed a very real service...
...Other than those which I have already commented on in other Xew Leader reviews, these paperbacks seem to me among the best of the 1957 crop, books which might well be worth bearing in mind in last-minute gift shopping...
...The paperbacks have always provided a generous selection from philosophy...
...Three important regional histories have also recently been reprinted: Verner W. Crane's The Southern Frontier, 1670-1732 (Ann Arbor Books, $1.45), Walter Prescott Webb's The Great Plains (Universal Library, $1.45), and J. Frank Dobie's account of the development of the Southwest in terms of its cattlemen and the breed they made famous, The Longhorns (Universal Library, $1.25...
...So, too, has Grosset's Universal Library in reprinting in The Shorter Novels of Herman Melville ($1.25) four of Melville's best short works: Benito Cereno, Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scrivener and The Encantadas...
...Offering crucial documents of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in good translations, she lets us see how the artists themselves faced and solved their problems...
...Though not precisely philosophy, a fine book that is well worth reading is Lucien Price's Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (Mentor, $.50...
...The collection is edited by Walter Kaufmann, who provides a long introductory essay...
...It is a difficult, rich work which accomplishes its object: It makes our past alive...
...The last two volumes, which will bring the story down to modern times, are promised for next year...
...This week, therefore, I want to discuss very briefly some of the best of those which I missed...
...These records of the dinner and after-dinner conversation of the great mathematician-philosopher reveal him to have been a person of very genuine warmth whose wisdom in practical matters was quite as impressive as his work in symbolic logic...
...Considerably more in the Christmas spirit is The Mentor Book of Religious Verse (Mentor, $.50), Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska's tasteful and unhackneyed anthology of devotional poetry...
...I don't feel really competent to discuss last year's enormous output in the area of scientific and technical matters, but I do want to recommend one title to the interested reader with a fairly limited background in science...
...The first two volumes, From Thales to Plato and From Aristotle to Plotinus, sell for $1.50 each...
...Two very opposite—though, I suspect, interrelated—aspects of it are presented in Benjamin Fine's study of juvenile crime, 1,000,000 Delinquents (Signet, $.50), and William H. Whyte's much-publicized account of a luckier group of adults, The Organization Man (Anchor, $1.45...
...Though this may not be one of those history-making anthologies which catch and set the taste of an era, it could be...
...Great Essays in Science ( Pocket Library, $.35) is exactly what it says it is—a collection of short papers by such major men of science as Freud, Einstein, Darwin, Oppenheimer, Whitehead and Eddington...
...Williams's book, though reprinted late in 1956 and technically outside the range of this article, sets out to explore the foundations of the American character through an examination of the lives and letters of those men who were instrumental in creating America...
...This is a Christmas present the literate reader should give himself...
...Eisenstein's comments on motion pictures as an art form represent the mature thought of one of film's great masters...
...Mentor's six volumes, The Mentor Philosophers, published at $.50 each, survey philosophy from Medieval times to the present...
...Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (Vintage, $.95), by another master of his art, Igor Stravinsky, attempts to set down for the layman "an explanation of music as I conceive it...
...Volume II includes Iolanthe, Ruddigore, The Yeomen of the Guard, The Sorcerer, The Pirates of Penzance, Trial by Jury and Utopia Limited...
...Presenting as it does 52 of the most interesting writers of the younger generation, it gives us a comprehensive glimpse of the texture of our times...
...The result is that books about art are more widely available than reproductions of art itself...
...The last collection especially, it seems to me, is a very important book for anyone interested in the direction of modern poetry...
...Of the books about art produced this year, the first installments of two sets are especially noteworthy...
...Meridian has also recently published an interesting anthology of selections from Dosto-yevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rilke, Kafka, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus under the title Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre ($1.45...
Vol. 40 • December 1957 • No. 50
