THE TELEPHONE BOOTH INDIAN

byA. J. Liebling '24. Doubleday, Doran andCompany. 1942. 266 pp. $2.00.

SINCE RING LARDNER was alive and doing his best work I have found no writing touching on the sporting fraternity and the gentlemen of the amusement world anywhere near as good as these New Yorker profiles by Mr. A. J. Liebling, collected under the title TheTelephone Booth Indian. Here are sketches, sharply drawn, perceptive, and often hilarious, of a variety of figures: Olsen and Johnson of Hellz-a-Poppin, Harry Susskind who in 1904 started the hat check business, the Boys from Syracuse (the Brothers Shubert), the Boy in the Pistachio Shirt (Roy Wilson Howard, newspaper tycoon), Mrs. Braune who keeps a lodging house for prize fighters in West 92nd Street. But easily outstanding is the remarkable account of the Jollity Building, type of a dozen buildings "in the high forties," in the upper stories of which the "small-scale amusement industry rests like a tramp pigeon."

Rents vary with the floor in the Jollity Building—the 48 cubicles on the third floor cost, in the words of Morty, the renting agent, twelve and a half dollars a month with air, "ten dollars without air." And the closepacked population, fixed and floating, includes such figures as Dr. Titus Heatherington, Mr. Hy Sky of the Quick Art Theatrical Sign Painteither ing Company, Hockticket Charlie, Maxwell C. Bimberg (Count de Pennies) who once offered a female boxer fifty dollars to let him hold her hand, Marty the Clutch, and Barney who runs the lunch counter in the basement and who never turns his head away from his customers during working hours. "If I'll turn my head, they'll run away without paying."

When I mentioned Ring Lardner I did not mean to imply in any sense that Mr. Liebling is an imitator or an echo. Ring Lardner was merely the highest and most appropriate point of excellence I could think of to measure him by. Mr. Liebling is quite himself. He has his own stlye, his own personal accent, his own way of reporting people. And unlike Lardner he never sours on his material. Mr. A. J. Liebling has great gusto and great talent, and TheTelephone Booth Indian displays both those qualities to the full.