Paperbacks for Christmas

...I wish I could be as sure that an equally commendable series instituted by Macmillan will find as wide a public, for just as we need to raise our scientific literacy, we need also—for quite as valid reasons —to raise our poetic literacy...

...And they include such rather specialized items as Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun (Torchbooks, $1.75) and Wilhelm Stekel's Patterns of Psychosexual Infantilism (Evergreen, $1.95), a book I had not intended to read but which caught my interest as I glanced through it and which held my interest steadily...

...Sandburg's own abridgment of his originally much longer work, this handsome, illustrated gift edition should solve a whole host of middle-cost present problems...

...An excellent start, for instance, might be the 10 initial volumes in the Signet Classics series...

...When all your shopping is done, there will remain (at least if your household is like ours) a group of books bought for distribution but discovered to be too good or too provocative lo let you part with them...

...If you and he are a little more wide-ranging in your fiction tastes both of you will probably want to look into Janet Lewis' The Wife of Martin Guerre (Swallow Paper-book, $1.25) and Margarita Lib-eraki's The Other Alexander (Noonday, $1.25...

...The first five titles (Donald J. Hughes' The Neutron Story, Patrick M. Hurley's How Old Is the Earth?, C. V. Boys' Soap Bubbles, Francis Bitter's Magnets and Donald R. Griffin's Echoes of Bats and Men, 95 cents each) will soon be supplemented by literally dozens more, each designed to make the teaching and study of science a more manageable enterprize...

...For the exploring brother-in-law, a happy trio might be Commander William R. Anderson's Nautilus 90 North (Signet, 50 cents), Robert Buchheim's Space Handbook (Modern Library Paperback, $1.25) and—something to relax with—Dell's Great Tales of Action and Adventure (35 cents...

...For drama readers Hill and Wang's Dramabook series reprints annually just about enough major work both in drama itself and in drama criticism to provide marvelous packages...

...The Anchor Science Study Series will have no difficulty locating an audience...

...for carefully edged sentiment, Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (Signet, 50 cents) ; and, for pure—and consequently quite wholesome—corn, H. E. Bates' The Darling Buds of May (Signet, 35 cents...

...Though other sets exist, perhaps the greatest Christmas fun is creating them—browsing through stores in search for just the right books for your wife's sister, a diligent student of international culture...

...And not far down the same shelf are the new editions of old favorites—works, read once, that are a joy to have fresh in the hands ready to read again: Wallace Stevens' extravagant and marvelous Poems (Vintage, 31.25), John Donne's powerful, precise Devotions (Ann Arbor, $1.65...

...Most recently issued of these are Dreiser's The Titan at 75 cents and Dostoyevsky's The House of the Dead at 50 cents...

...If her taste extends to things political, she should certainly have—for crucial background investigation—United Arab Republic President Gamal Abdel Nasser's The Philosophy of the Revolution (Economia Books, $1.00) and Swallow Paperbook's Readings on Fascism and National Socialism ($1.35...

...Hayden Carruth's The Crow and the Heart ($1.50) is both eloquent and graceful...

...And Macmillan's new series could help...

...Ramon Guthrie's Graffiti ($1.00) is intricately tough...

...and Perry Miller's Jonathan Edwards (Meridian, $1.45...

...or, in this case, of good reading...

...His anguished patients have more reality for us, I suspect, than they ever did for themselves...

...You could pretty well count on his enjoying Noonday's Great Stories by Nobel Prize Winners ($1.95) and would probably be safe in backing that solid book with Alberto Moravia's Two Women (Signet, 50 cents), Mark Harris' brilliant, moving novel, Something About a Soldier (Signet, 35 cents) and Marek Hlasko's The 8th Day of the Week (Signet, 35 cents...

...Aimed in part toward the specialist and in part toward a popular audience, the books should do a great deal to help raise the level of scientific literacy...

...The ones my wife and I have decided not to let get away range spectacularly in subject matter, but all of them have one thing in common: One or the other of us wants to read them...

...for your brother-in-law, an ardent explorer both of the world and the world of fact...

...or for your good-fiction-reading neighbor...

...These, with good management, could constitute a first-rate annual contribution to a fine library...

...And beside these books are the ones we want to read for sheer intellectual exercise: Lasker's The Adventure of Chess (Dover, $1.45)—I've recently had enough of this quoted to me to know that it's entertaining—and Sir Arthur Eddington's New Pathways in Science (Ann Arbor, $1.95...

...A start for the internationally minded wife's sister might be Marc Slonim's An Outline of Russian Literature (Mentor, 50 cents), Wilfred Cantwell Smith's Islam in Modern History (Mentor, 50 cents), George L. Harris' Jordan (Evergreen, $1.95) and Alan W. Watts' The Way of Zen (Mentor, 50 cents)—a group which should satisfy Eurasian interests, at least...

...Paperbacks for Christinas By John Unterecker Assistant Professor of English, Columbia University NOW THAT THE desperate last-minute rush of Christmas shopping is on us, a list of some of the outstanding paperbacks of the year might be of real help to the harried bringer of good cheer...

...With almost all paperback publishers investing heavily in books designed to make science less awesome, you have a real choice of sets...

...The fiction-reading neighbor presents, of course, no real problem except one of limitations...

...Stekel, unlike many workers in the psychological vineyard, manages to give his case histories a kind of three-dimensional reality...

...Though I can't recommend these books as a set for reckless distribution, they might very well constitute one of those Christmas presents we end up giving to ourselves...

...Macmillan's plan is to begin regular publishing of major living poets in paperback format, the idea being that low cost and good distribution should assure the greatest possible readership...

...As a matter of fact, one of the best ways to solve present-problems with paperbacks, it seems to me, is by assembling sets from some of the specialized editions...

...There they sit, the ones we're reading or eager to read: Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (Anchor, $1.45), a book which anyone who has ever glanced at The Origins of Totalitarianism knows is something he needs...

...Others in the series are David Galler's Walls and Distances ($1.00), Reed Whitte-more's The Self-Made Man ($1.25) and Winfield Townley Scott's Scrimshaw ($1.25...

...Or with a $3.15 gift, a good beginning of a poetry bookshelf could be constructed from Dell's Laurel Poets series (35 cents each) which, to date, includes generous selections in individual volumes from Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth, Poe, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Longfellow and Browning...

...Among their best efforts this year are volumes devoted to plays by Farquhar ($1.75) and Turgenev ($1.25...

...Vasari's Lives of the Artists (Noonday, $1.75...

...Dell, as a matter of fact, offers all sorts of possibilities for set giving, with a Shakespeare series in progress (As You Like It, Macbeth and Twelfth Night, at 35 cents each, being recent entries), a Henry James set just under way (four volumes so far, with a double volume of Washington Square and The Europeans at 50 cents as the latest) and a projected edition of major works by Dreiser and Dostoyevsky...

...They're a random crew, extending from Edwin Way Teale's A Book About Bees (Midland, $1.95) through Mark Van Doren's Liberal Education (Beacon, $1.75) to J. H. Breasted's Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (Torch-books, $1.95...

...Certainly the choice of poets for the initial volumes is a good one...

...a lively new collection of letters, speeches and articles, Shaw on Theatre ($1.35) and an edition of his early work, Shaw's Dramatic Criticism ($1.45...

...Each priced at 50 cents, these "classics" of fiction include such diverse but solid works as William Faulkner's The Unvanquished, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, George Orwell's Animal Farm and Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native...

...Perhaps most ambitious is that planned by Anchor as its Science Study Series...

...a book by, to my mind, the most eloquent and certainly one of the wisest living essayists, Joseph Wood Krutch, Five Masters (Midland, $1.75...

...Probably the logical head of the list should be the three-volume boxed set of Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln (Dell, Laurel Edition, $2.95...

...and an exciting volume for anyone interested in theater as an art form, Japanese Theatre ($2.25...

...And if you want to provide him, as well, a little light reading, offer him, for satire, Peter De Vries' The Mackerel Plaza (Signet, 35 cents...

...and Katherine Hoskins' Out in the Open ($1.25) is simply admirable...