17,000 Book Reviews

Lisle Bell has probably reviewed more books than anyone in the world. Total is now around 17,000. But even among reviewers in Manhattan, where he has practiced his craft for 26 years, Bell is almost unknown. The reason: he specializes in the brief, unsigned booknote, turns them out at the rate of twelve a week.

The few of his fellow craftsmen who know him consider him the most skilled practitioner of a most difficult kind of book reviewing. Critic Van Wyck Brooks, when he edited the Freeman, said that Lisle Bell had invented a new form, ranked him with highbrow Scottish Critic Edwin Muir. Poet Marianne Moore, who edited the Dial's brief booknotes for the ten years Bell contributed, called one cluster of his reviews the best thing she had seen. The reason why Reviewer Bell has never received recognition for his services to U.S. letters: his 17,000 reviews have been written as a sideline, while he was working as a newspaperman, turning out a newspaper column, advertising copy, vaudeville skits, Mack Sennett comedies.

Christmas Package. The typical Lisle Bell review is a 200-or 300-word synthesis, usually of a light novel, with its plot outlined, setting and characters identified in one sentence, the author's distinctive quality set down accurately in unhackneyed terms in another, and the paragraph wound up as neatly as a Christmas package, with an amiable ironic phrase. His reviews are seldom malicious, very rarely given to unqualified praise. But only experts, looking back over Bell's collected works, can appreciate how outspoken he has been about many forgotten figures among literature's briefly great. Occasionally, but not often, Bell reviews at length a book given him for a book-note. One such was Dr. Axel Munthe's recollections, The Story of San Michele (it was neglected by publishers who thought it was a travel book). Bell's favorable comment in the Herald Tribune Books was its only Manhattan review. The book sold 250,000 copies.

High-Power Condenser. Now 51, the son of a real-estate dealer who did not believe in education, Bell began publishing reviews as soon as he got out of high school. When he was a 19-year-old cub reporter on the Ohio State Journal at Columbus he wrote the paper's book reviews for nothing in his spare time.

Soon after Bell reached Manhattan, the late Clarence Britten hired him to write the Dial's brief reviews. That extraordinary literary journal carried pages of condensed reviews, most of which Bell wrote, and which for literary quality and precision of judgment ranked with the best writing in the magazine.

He also did the booknotes for the Nation. When Irita Van Doren became editor of the Herald Tribune's book section (1926), she got Bell to do its brief reviews. He has been doing them ever since. In one summer-fiction number of the supplement he guided readers to 65 examples of hammock reading, wrote nine reviews and a long article summarizing the year's light fiction--almost half the supplement.

Last week Reviewer Bell's output was temporarily curtailed. With a constitutional weakness in his legs, he fell in 1936, broke his left leg. Fortnight ago, he fell again, broke the other one.

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