Recent Reprints
REPRINTS during the last couple of months include books of appeal and of importance. As a personal choice I should put, as an easy winner amongst books of appeal, Lark Rise to Candle- ford, by Flora Thompson (O.U.P., 8s. 6d.). This consists of three
works, originally published separately round about 1940, descrip- tive of life in rural England sixty and seventy years ago, and now published in a single volume. The author, who died in 1947, writes of the life that she herself lived, the life of the 'labouring poor,' and she writes with uncanny readability. The book is rightly compared, in an introduction by H. J. Massingham, with the work of George Bourne; it has the same classic quality.
First among reprints of importance comes Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Everyman Library, 2 vols., 7s. each). Hooker's great work was the subject of a Spectator artifle by Professor Norman Sykes on November 12 last, 1954 having been the 400th anniversary of Hooker's birth. The book is not new in the Everyman Library, but as now reissued it has a new introduction by Christopher Morris.
The current revival of interest in the italic hand has produced several books, but Faber's have now republished, at 12s. 6d., 'a
new, revised and enlarged' edition of the classic of the revival, Alfred Fairbank's A Handwriting Manual, originally published in 1932, and still the most interesting, as it is certainly the most practical, book in its field.
Baudelaire and the Symbolists was originally written by Peter Quennell at the suggestion of Mr. T. S. Eliot, and was first
published in 1929. It is now reissued (by Weidenfeld and Nicolson at 18s.) at the suggestion of Mr. Cyril Connolly. Comment upon a book which has appeared and reappeared under such auspices is clearly superfluous: but people may wish to be reminded that the book contains studies of Nerval, Villiers de l'lsle Adam, Laforgue, Corbiere, Rimbaud and Mallarme, as well as, of course, Baudelaire himself.
Routledge have now added to the compact little volumes which comprise their Muses' Library The Poems of Ben Jonson, with an introduction by George Burke Johnston (18s.).
Other recent reprints include:
Principles of Public Finance, by Hugh Dalton (Routledge, 10s. 6d.). A fourth edition, described by the author as 'very nearly a new book,' of the work originally published in 1922.
A History of the United States, by D. C. Somervell (Heine- mann, 15s.). A revised, reset and re-illustrated edition of the book first published in 1942, which the publishers were unable to reprint at the time.
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