President's Books

On the ground floor of the White House there is a big room lined with large, locked, glass-fronted bookcases. This is the White House Library. Spacious but bare, it has only a few hundred books on the white-framed shelves designed to hold almost 2,000. Last week a committee representing the American Booksellers Association carried to Washington 200 more volumes for the great open spaces on the White House shelves--a collection of 34 biographies,

37 works of fiction, 29 books on history and current affairs, seven mystery stories, 13 books of poetry and plays, 15 adventure books, twelve on science, twelve on art and 56 miscellaneous volumes.

The White House Library came into being in 1929, when the Booksellers Association donated 500 volumes; in 1933 they gave 200 more. Before it was started Presidents depended on their personal collections kept in the White House study, and on books from the Library of Congress. When the new batch of White House reading matter was presented by President Lewis B. Traver of the Booksellers Association, it was parked first on the second floor, where members of the Roosevelt family could select what they wanted to read, and where Mrs. Roosevelt could pick books to place in guest rooms.

Because publishers have tried to make capital of books that he is reported to enjoy, President Roosevelt refuses to discuss what he reads, let alone what he likes to read. Unlike Theodore Roosevelt, who took an active interest in current literature, found jobs for struggling poets (including Edwin Arlington Robinson), and scribbled notes to young magazine contributors whose pieces he liked, Franklin Roosevelt pays little attention to creative writing. Unlike Presidents Hoover and Wilson, he reads few detective stories.

The sea, the U. S. Navy and Andrew Jackson are his favorite subjects, with his taste in fiction inclining him to Bret Harte and Dickens, whose first editions he collects. Lately he has been reading Marquis James's Andrew Jackson and David Cushman Coyle's Why Pay Taxes?

The booksellers' collection of 200 volumes contained many books of only immediate interest, a few which had very little of that. Nor did its seven detective stories seem destined to be the nucleus of a permanent collection. The fiction, which looked weak in comparison with the biography and works of history, included Gone With the Wind and Of Time and the River, but it also numbered such minor works of doubtful durability as Fannie Hurst's We Are Ten and Robert Nathan's Enchanted Voyage. But with works of the stature of Douglas Southall Freeman's R. E. Lee, James's Andrew Jackson, Van Wyck Brooks's The Flowering of New England, Robert & Helen Lynd's Middle town in Transition, Sandburg's The People, Yes, Mencken's The American Language, the White House Library received a few books last week that seemed likely to outlive its present inhabitants.

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