Personals

"If the man who caused the death of seven lives by placing a bomb in an airliner in October will openly confess, he will save himself years of mental torture and free his conscience. A Victim."

This New York Herald Tribune advertisement, obviously referring to the crash of a passenger plane in Indiana, last week afforded a rare treat to regular readers of Public Notices in U. S. newsheets. "Personal" columns in London papers are usually full of interesting and mysterious appeals, appointments and code messages. In the U. S. they are taken up almost exclusively by statements from husbands who will no longer be responsible for their wives' debts, eccentric job-hunters, Mexican divorce lawyers and, in Manhattan, the dismal efforts of one Hiram Mann to get himself elected to Congress on a platform of back pay for Brooklyn Navy Yard workers.

Connoisseurs of personals have lately been able to indulge their taste in the sedate, intensely bookish Saturday Review of Literature. In May of 1932 the Saturday Review's gnomish little Editor Henry Seidel Canby accepted the magazine's first personal. Last week's issue contained two columns. Samples :

" WANTED, Young man between twenty-four and thirtyfour, expert scavenger, for a party. Must be tall, personable, poised, and above all quick witted. Locality, Boston. Box 362." "YOUNG LADY, 28, who, stationed in a lonely mission station in the jungles of India, has not seen a white man to talk with in a year, would welcome correspondence with a man of 30 or over, interested in books, music, folks and real living, who is as lonely as she is, 'Teddy.' " "YOUNG man, 22, isolated from all congenial companions, desires correspondence with young man interested in literature and music. Write R. W. Billings, Plainfield, Mass."

Other issues of the Saturday Review have contained as many as three columns of personals, some sensible, some so quaint that readers have suspected its large, expansively whimsical Colyumist Christopher Morley of writing them. Sample :

"BRRRR! Does the beautiful blonde with the blue eyes in Chicago wish to continue the discussion of things literary with the dark-haired man motoring to the Arctic Circle? Say yes, please. Will be in Windy City with trunkful of icicles October 11th. "THAW MAN."

The Saturday Review's personal column started when Poet Louis Untermeyer returned from a trip to Sardinia with a donkey which he wanted to sell. He accepted Editor Canby's suggestion to advertise it in the Saturday Review. Editor Canby and Colyumist Morley insist that none of the advertisements is written in the office.

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