AN ADVENTURE IN TEXTBOOKS.

Bylames M. Reid '24. New York & London:R. R. Bow her Company, 1969. 198 pgs.$7.95.

Back in the palmy days of 1924 James Reid, then a senior majoring in philosophy, happened to run into Professor James Mecklin in the old Putnam's Drugstore. Over a cup of coffee, Mecklin urged his student to give up any notion of teaching as a career and instead offered to supply him with a letter of introduction to the New York publishing house of Harcourt, Brace. Before the spring was out, Reid had landed a job as salesman in Harcourt's high school textbook department. The honeymoon (which, typically, had its good and bad moments) lasted 36 years, during which Reid became editorm-chief of Harcourt, Brace's high school and college divisions and made his mark as one of education's ablest bookmen.

Written as an informal memoir, An Adventure in Textbooks takes us through the best and the worst of the industry. On the one hand we meet the dedicated craftsmen and scholars such as Louis Untermeyer (with whom Reid collaborated on an under-the-counter anthology of barroom songs and bawdy ballads), William Rose Benet, A. J. Liebling, Cleanth Brooks, John Ciardi, and S. I. Hayakawa. On the seamier side of affairs we see at first hand the frantic skirmishing between publishers for the greatest of all plums, the state adoption. The goal is to have your text be the one, or one of the few, receiving official approval of the board of education in such states as Texas and California. The prize is book sales of tens of thousands and profits of tens of millions. Predictably, there are suggestions of "favors" and, perhaps most lamentable, "re-modeling" a book to get it past the particular prejudices of the adoption committee. The reward often comes not for what is in a book, but what isn't.

An Adventure in Textbooks may tell many readers more than they want to know about the Harcourt, Brace family, but there is also an abundance of personal references to Dartmouth and the Dartmouth family. One opportunity that the author lets go aglimmering is the Saturday in the mid-1930s when he attended the Dartmouth-Yale game with his boss, Alfred Harcourt, and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. That occasion should be worth a book in itself - and maybe even a movie.

Before returning to Dartmouth as Assistantto the Secretary of the College, Mr. Dinanworked for American Heritage PublishingCo.in New York City.