THOUGHTS FROM ADAM SMITH.

Compiled by Clyde E. Dankert. Hanover,1963.

Clyde Dankert, long known as an authority on labor economics, also teaches at the College the history of economic thought (Economics 64). This congenial assignm ent has resulted in his developing an unusual and also productive busman's hobby. He has become interested in Adam Smith's relationships with other famous authors and in evaluating Smith's stature as a man of letters. In consequence of this excursion into belles-lettres, Professor Dankert has published articles in the Dalhousie Review,Queen's Quarterly, and Studies in Literatureand Language, and as a by-product — an appropriate economist's term - of these literary labors he has also collected and edited the small but choice anthology of Thoughts from Adam Smith that is the subject of this review.

All but a few of the quotations in Professor Dankert's selection are taken either from The Wealth of Nations (1776) or The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), about equally divided between the two books. To my taste the quotations from The Wealth ofNations are the more interesting, having more bite and snap than the quotations from the earlier work, which seems, in comparison, rather banal and platitudinous. The editor's notes are workmanlike, informative, and often humorous.

This small volume, which bears the imprint of Hanover, N. H., has been sumptuously designed and magnificently printed by the Stinehour Press of Lunenburg, Vermont. Persons desiring to procure Professor Dankert's anthology may obtain it there. The Stinehour Press, which has so quickly achieved an enviable reputation for the beauty of its work, is this year celebrating its tenth anniversary.

At the moment that I write. Hopkins Center has the honor of exhibiting (through the good offices of Professor Ray Nash, who is also the former teacher of Roderick Stinehour '50) some of the sixteenth-century typographical artifacts and magnificent example's of printing from the Plantin-Moretus Museum at Antwerp, the Hopkins showing being the first time that any Plantin-Moretus originals have been exhibited outside Europe. As one muses upon these treasures, one cannot help hoping that eventually some philanthropist or foundation will similarly embalm the Stinehour Press, so that in the twenty-third or twenty-fourth century the amateurs of fine printing may visit Lunenburg, Vermont, and marvel at the skill of their twentieth-century forbears.