Golden Book

Among the Christmas magazines at the news-stalls there lay a newcomer, a monthly fiction magazine, with a creamy cover, a big golden moon, a golden skirted lady and gold stars. You stared at this magazine because there, beside the lady's golden skirt, in big red letters, the list of contributors looked so extraordinary. You had heard all the names before, but for a moment you could in no way connect them with a news-stall. It was like running across a bishop in a saloon or seeing your wife about to play quarter- back for the 'Varsity. "Hullo, what are you doing here?" you said, as you read: "Heine, Dumas, Kipling, Gaborian, Tolstoy, de Alarcon, Anatole France, Robert Louis Stevenson "

The magazine was The Golden Book, was published by the Review of Reviews Corporation. An editorial note explained: "The original Libra D'Oro, the Golden Book of Venice, was the official list of the Venetian nobility, who alone could vote or hold office in that remarkable republic of aristocrats." This Golden Book, then, was for a literary aristocracy, "not of birth, but of performance." It was a new monthly anthology of classic fiction, the sort of volume you might make up unconsciously by rummaging during a month of evenings among the master tale-tellers in your library. The editors--Henry Wysham Lanier, of the Review of Reviews, assisted by Dr. William Lyon Phelps, high priest of letters at Yale University, Stuart P. Sherman, literary editor of the New York Herald-Tribune, John Cotton Dana, Newark librarian, and Professor-Emeritus Charles Mills Gayley of the University of California--had made a profuse but neat collection of tales, poems and tag-end tid-bits from great writers of all ages. Pages of parallel quotations were entitled Some Women I Have Met and How Men Make Love in Novels. There was a Booklover's Calendar for the month. All this--160 pages of vivid and readable literary high spots for 25-c- the copy.