Hanover Browsing
THERE ARE readers—and lam one of them—whose reading is rather like a series of intoxications. We fall in love with a book; it is our book, we feel, for life; we shall not need another. . . . . These returns to old books .... have often proved, in a life of desultory reading, to be among the pleasantest experiehces of that pleasant scheme of existence." So writes Logan Pearsall Smith in his latest book Reperusals and Re-Collections, a collection of his best essays written over a period of forty years or so. Here you will find erudite and delightful essays on Montaigne, perennial fount of wisdom, Madame de Sevigne, greatest of women writers in Smith's opinion, Pater, SainteBeuve, Gertrude Jekyll, John Donne, and many others. With Santayana, Logan Pearsall Smith is one of the best stylists living. He is an American, long a resident of England, who should be much more widely read. Last year I commented in these columns in his On Reading Shakespeare, but this is a better book with which to become acquainted with a writer who may well become one of the most cheerful of your companions.
It was in early September that Frank Horan '22 came to town, and in the course o£ events recommended to me A. P. Herbert's amusing book Uncommon Law. This is a book which will convulse all lawyers who have a sense of humor, and surely all of them have one, and I am willing to wager these "famous cases" will have the same effect on all other readers. In the case of Suet vs. Haddock, for example, his Lordship thus addresses the jury: "Now, if the defendant has not established to your satisfaction that the words complained of are true in substance and in fact and, in order to muddle you, I should explain that they may be true in fact but not in substance, as they may be correct in substance but erroneous in fact—then there remains the defence of fair comment, etc., etc." Any comment here would be superfluous, but if you want a few good laughs buy this book. Double day, Dor an is the publisher.
Those alumni who prefer tennis to golf (I believe I can count half a dozen hands) will enjoy E. C. Potter Jr.'s book entitled Kings of the Court published by Scribner's. Mr. Potter sketches the history of the game from its beginnings in the eighties to the super Wimbledon and Forest Hills of today. He rates Tilden the greatest of all players, as do most expert followers of the game. The book is dedicated to the noblest Roman of them all—King Gustav of Sweden.
