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A convenient size and a beautiful binding are more than desiderata. Who, wishing Bram Stoker’s grim masterpiece, Dracula, would not now prefer a new copy in the handy leather of the Lambskin Library? If one is out to acquire a copy of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, will he not choose it in its plum-coloured leather and gilt top of the Murray Hill Library? If I go forth to buy Pride and Prejudice, I am as certain as anything to ask for it from the volumes of the Modern Student’s Library, because this will give me William Dean Howells’s introduction to the novel.
There is a further advantage of these collections in that they give ready and inexpensive access to exceptional books that are otherwise out of print. I might have excessive trouble, for example, to get hold of Dracula elsewhere. Yet the commonest advantage of such sets is probably as a guide in reading. A publisher does not put a book into his Lambskin Library, or his Murray Hill Library, or his Modern Student’s Library unless the book is one of proved worth and established permanence and continuing popularity. The Library, therefore, offers a convenient and trustworthy solution to those who, among books not freshly published, are unable to see the trees for the forest. A word about these collections is in order.
The Lambskin Library at present comprises nearly fifty volumes, chiefly fiction, although Lawrence F. Abbott’s Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt, Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life, Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery and Franklin’s Autobiography lay a massive foundation for biographies. Conrad, Frank Norris, Selma Lagerlöf, O. Henry, Dumas, Scott, Tarkington, Edna Ferber, Ellen Glasgow, Zola and Rider Haggard are some of the authors represented. Many of the books have interesting prefatory notes and among the contributors of these are William Lyon Phelps, Christopher Morley, William Allen White, John Macy and William Dean Howells.
The Modern Student’s Library is ultimately to include as many as possible of the books one would wish to read in a comprehensive survey of English and American literature. Both the general reader and the student have been held in mind; the books represent a sane departure from the heavily annotated texts of a few years ago. The books have been edited, and introductions to them have been provided by such authorities as William Dean Howells, Stuart P. Sherman, William Lyon Phelps and Carl Van Doren. Bacon’s Essays, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Browning, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, Emerson’s Essays, Hardy’s The Return of the Native, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Meredith, Ruskin, Scott, Stevenson, Thackeray, Thoreau and Whitman are among those already included.
The Murray Hill Library, commencing with modern fiction, will probably enlarge its scope to include some of the best modern non-fiction. Its very handsome binding now covers twelve books, picked works by Arnold Bennett, Somerset Maugham, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Irvin S. Cobb, Walpole, G. A. Birmingham, John Buchan, Stephen McKenna, Swinnerton and Richard Dehan.
Of an entirely different character but not less valuable are the very large volumes of the Nature Library—those volumes by Neltje Blanchan, Julia Ellen Rogers, Nina L. Marshall and others called (for the most part) The Butterfly Book, The Shell Book, The Tree Book, and so on. Fairly expensive books, these, but cheap at any price with their many and wonderful colour plates and photographs from life. In their outdoor field they are not to be surpassed.
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Books of a biographical character we have considered already (Chapter 8) but it ought to be emphasised that, for the investor in literature, they hold a position quite as enviable and altogether desirable as does the class of securities known as municipals for the investor of moneys. Time will not match for us a book like Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, nor will literature furnish us with a more strangely suggestive career than that related in Raymond Weaver’s Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic. It was C. Alphonso Smith’s O. Henry Biography that first gave the world the facts on which to base a true understanding of that extraordinary writer. The tale of unwearied courage in Edward Livingston Trudeau’s Autobiography cannot lose either its freshness nor its strength of inspiration. To read P. P. Howe’s Life of William Hazlitt and then to turn to his little book of selections called The Best of Hazlitt is to enter into a permanently valuable share of the English literary inheritance. The Letters of Henry James, selected and edited by Percy Lubbock, and James’s own Notes of a Son and Brother; Sir Sidney Colvin’s John Keats and his Memories and Notes of Persons and Places; the Letters of James Huneker and Huneker’s autobiography, Steeplejack; and the Letters and Papers of John Addington Symonds, edited by Horatio F. Brown, are all of the class of books whose content is a permanent acquisition, an actual “property” of which the reader, in legal language, becomes seized and possessed.
One’s investment in an ample author should be allowed to ramify in all directions natural to the lines of human interest. About Walt Whitman, for example, there is by now a cluster of books which the reader of Leaves of Grass or of Whitman’s prose cannot afford, in their entirety, to neglect. Whether he will want one or all, or what ones he will want, will depend upon the relation he establishes with Whitman himself. The best brief biography is Walt Whitman: The Man and His Work, translated from the French of Leon Bazalgette by Ellen FitzGerald. Personally I do not think one can feel himself acquainted with Whitman unless he has read, or read in, the three massive volumes of Horace Traubel’s With Walt Whitman in Camden. The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman, edited by Thomas B. Harned, form an unusual and engrossing chapter in the lives of both. Those keenly interested will explore further yet in the two volumes of the Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, edited by Emory Holloway, who is now at work on a long and comprehensive biography of the poet.