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Any one can review a book and every one should be encouraged to do it. It is unskilled labor. Good book reviewers earn from $150 to $230 a week, working only in their spare time, like the good-looking young men and women who sell the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Country Gentleman but who seldom earn over $100 a week. Book reviewing is one of the very few subjects not taught by the correspondence schools, simply because there is nothing to teach. It is so simple a child can operate it with perfect safety. Write for circular giving full particulars and our handy phrasebook listing 2,567 standard phrases indispensable to any reviewer—FREE.
In reviewing a book there is no method to be followed. Like one of the playerpianos, you shut the doors (i.e., close the covers) and play (or write) by instinct! Although no directions are necessary we will suggest a few things to overcome the beginner’s utterly irrational sense of helplessness.
One of the most useful comments in dealing with very scholarly volumes, such as A History of the Statistical Process in Modern Philanthropical Enterprises by Jacob Jones, is as follows: “Mr. Jones’s work shows signs of haste.” The peculiar advantage of this is that you do not libel Mr. Jones; the haste may have been the printer’s or the publisher’s or almost anybody’s but the postoffice’s. In the case of a piece of light fiction the best way to start your review is by saying: “A new book from the pen of Alice Apostrophe is always welcome.” But suppose the book is a first book? One of the finest opening sentences for the review of a first book runs: “For a first novel, George Lamplit’s Good Gracious! is a tale of distinct promise.” Be careful to say “distinct”; it is an adjective that fits perfectly over the shoulders of any average-chested noun. It gives the noun that upright, swagger carriage a careful writer likes his nouns to have.