Twelfth Thousand. With eight plates and vignette title by F. P. Mahony.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d.; paper cover, 2s. 6d. (postage, 6d.)
Also in two parts (each complete in itself), in picture covers, at 1s.;
post free, 1s. 3d. each (Commonwealth Series).
The Academy: “A book of honest, direct, sympathetic, humorous writing about Australia from within is worth a library of travellers' tales. Mr. Lawson shows us what living in the bush really means. The result is a real book—a book in a hundred. His language is terse, supple, and richly idiomatic.”
Mr. A. Patchett Martin, in Literature (London): “A book which Mrs. Campbell Praed, the Australian novelist, assured me made her feel that all she had written of bush life was pale and ineffective.”
The Spectator: “In these days when short, dramatic stories are eagerly looked for, it is strange that one we would venture to call the greatest Australian writer should be practically unknown in England. Short stories, but biting into the very heart of the bushman's life, ruthless in truth, extraordinarily dramatic, and pathetically uneven....”
The Times: “A collection of short and vigorous studies and stories of Australian life and character. A little in Bret Harte's manner, crossed, perhaps, with that of Guy de Maupassant.”
[The Announcements at the end of this section give alternate titles for two of Lawson's works, to wit: “On the Track” is given as such, but “Over the Sliprails” is given as “By the Sliprails”, and the combined work “On the Track and Over the Sliprails” is given as “By Track and Sliprails”. Of course, only “On the Track” had actually been printed at the date of the advertisement, so it might be theorized that these had been working titles, afterwards discarded, whose inclusion here was overlooked.—A. L., 1998.]