"Names make news." Last week these names made this news:

In a booth at a London Fair, Queen Mary saw a jigsaw puzzle, tried to put it together, failed, bought it. Next day she made more news by wearing a feather-decked hat instead of her customary high toque.

In Italian Somaliland, Italy's straight little Vittorio Emanuele III landed from the royal yacht Savoia, dedicated a new fort on the boundary of envious Ethiopia, marched into the jungle on a big-game hunt.

Norway's devout. Democratic King Haakon VII received in audience Rev. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman, who had taken his Oxford Groups to Oslo for a House Party.

Leaving a Los Angeles concert, wily Cinemactress Greta Garbo chose a rear exit. In the alley outside she came face to face with a wilier cameraman. For a moment camera-hating Garbo hesitated. Then, hoisting skirts and cloak, she covered her face, exposed her petticoat, fled straight past the delighted photographer.

Columbia University Press announced that between 1872 and 1932 its pontifical President Nicholas Murray (''Nicholas Miraculous") Butler wrote 3,200 books, reports, speeches, articles, and introductions. Author Butler's first literary effort : Questions and Answers for Admission to the Paterson (N. J.) High School. His latest: a speech last week at Columbia commemorating the 1,000th anniversary of the birth of Persia's Epic Poet Firdausi.

In her home on Brattle Street, Cambridge, Mass., Miss Alice A. Thorp, granddaughter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was entertaining visitors when she heard footsteps above. Fluttering upstairs, Miss Thorp peeked into a bedroom just in time to see a closet door close softly. She tugged it open. Out of the closet scuttled a scared prowler to jump through the window, vanish.

At an auction in Manhattan of the library of the late antiquarian Rev. Dr. Roderick Terry, Bookdealer Gabriel Wells paid $9,750 for a First Folio edition of Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.

"Permit me to extend a cordial invitation to Babbitt to visit the Paris Exposition in 1937," said the French General Commissioner of the exposition. Edmond Labbe, speaking at the American Club in Paris. "I know he would appreciate our exposition of art and technique. It will be an exposition made for Babbitt and his kind in other nations, be they called Durand and du Pont, Smith and Jones, or Ivanov and Levy. . . ."

For an autograph which looked like Composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's, Walter Toscanini, long-nosed son of Conductor Arturo Toscanini, once paid 2,700 lire ($229.50). Shortly Son Walter, a rare-book dealer, learned that the signature was forged, gave Milan police a tip as to who the forger was. They found the rogue, one Tobia Nicotra, in his workshop, busy making autographs of Christopher Columbus, Lorenzo de' Medici, Warren Gamaliel Harding, many another.

In court last week Accuser Toscanini testified that Nicotra visited the U. S. in 1932, posed as the late Musician Richard Drigo, was widely feted. Two years in jail was Nicotra's sentence. Said Dealer Toscanini: "I wanted to restore the faith of foreign collectors in Italian dealers."

New York's Mayor & Mrs. Fiorello Henry LaGuardia formally adopted two children: brunette Jean, 6, niece of the Mayor's first wife, and blond Eric, 4, an orphan.

The Philadelphia office of strenuous, steel-eyed William Wallace Atterbury, 68-year-old president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, great & good friend of the late Ivy Lee (see p. 34), got wind of rumors that "The General" was critically ill. Since he had a gallstone removed last August, General Atterbury had kept away from his office. For a fortnight he had been cruising off Florida in his yacht Arminia. There the rumors were relayed to him last week. The Arminia put in at Miami, where her master received newshawks on deck, thumped his chest heartily and crowed: "I'm the livest, kickingest person you ever saw. I haven't felt so good since last July."

"I have always loved poetry. I have deplored its decline in this country. . . . Numbers of my friends felt the same way. We decided to do something about it." By way of doing something about it, Mrs, Hugh Bullock, daughter-in-law of Investment Banker Calvin Bullock, announced in Manhattan the birth of the Academy of American Poets. Prime function of the Academy, as soon as Founder Bullock & friends can raise a fat endowment, will be to patronize eight or ten lucky U. S. poets by annual stipends of $5,000 apiece. No poet herself but a rich and comely young socialite. Mrs. Bullock had enlisted as sponsors Mrs. Calvin Coolidge (The Open Door, The Quest, Watch Fires}, Mrs. James Roosevelt. Owen D. Young, Princess Barbara Hutton Mdivani. many an other bigwig, poetic or unpoetic. Said Mrs. Bullock: "Poets must eat. . . . Our entire purpose is to free genius from the necessity of gaining a livelihood by almost any means except the means it was born to use."

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