IN THE HEART OF A FOOL. By William Allen White. A story of Kansas in the last half-century, centered in a single town, showing its evolution from prairie to an industrial city with difficult economic and labor problems; the story told in the lives of a group of people, pioneers and the sons of pioneers—their work, ambitions, personal affairs, &c. New York: The Macmillan Company. $1.60.
That would be under the heading Fiction. An entry under the heading Literary Studies or Essays might read:
OUR POETS OF TO-DAY. By Howard Willard Cook. Volume II. in a series of books on modern American writers. Sketches of sixty-eight American poets, nearly all living, including Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell, Witter Bynner, Robert Service, Edgar Guest, Charles Divine, Carl Sandburg, Joyce Kilmer, Sara Teasdale, George Edward Woodberry, Percy Mackaye, Harriet W. Monroe, &c. New York: Moffat, Yard & Co. $1.60.
These we hasten to say would be unusually full and satisfactory records, but they would be records just the same—formal and precise statements of events, like the chronological facts affixed to dates in an almanac. If all records were like these there would be less objection to them; but it is an astonishing truth that most records are badly kept. Why, one may never fathom; since the very formality and precision make a good record easy. Yet almost any of the principal pages or magazines in the United States devoted to the news of new books is likely to make a record on this order:
IN THE HEART OF A FOOL. By William Allen White. Novel of contemporary American life. New York, &c.
Such a record is, of course, worse than inadequate; it is actually misleading. Mr. White’s book happens to cover a period of fifty years. “Contemporary American life” would characterize quite as well, or quite as badly, a story of New York and Tuxedo by Robert W. Chambers.
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The reporter works in entirely another manner. He is concerned to present the facts about a new book in a way sufficiently arresting and entertaining to engage the reader. As Mr. Holliday says with fine perception, the true function of the describer of new books is simply to bring a particular volume to the attention of its proper public. To do that it is absolutely necessary to “give the book,” at least to the extent of enabling the reader of the article to determine, with reasonable accuracy (1) whether the book is for him, that is, addressed to a public of which he is one, and (2) whether he wants to read it or not.
Whether the book is good or bad is not the point. A man interested in sociology may conceivably want to read a book on sociology even though it is an exceedingly bad book on that subject and even though he knows its worthlessness. He may want to profit by the author’s mistakes; he may want to write a book to correct them; or he may merely want to be amused at the spectacle of a fellow sociologist making a fool of himself, a spectacle by no means rare but hardly ever without a capacity for giving joy to the mildly malicious.