AMERICAN BOOKS IN LONDON.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—I hope that Messrs. D. Appleton and Co. and other American publishers in London will forgive me for my seeming forgetfulness of their benign presence in London these many years. But obviously I was not referring to them when I said that one could not buy American books in London. If one has the name of the book and the name of the publisher and a London telephone directory, and if the publisher happens to keep that particular book in stock over here (which I have found is not always the case), one may by slipping about among the cabbages of Covent Garden come by an American book or two in London.
But nowhere in town is there to my knowledge a bookshop where one can actually see American books, hunt for a volume one has heard of vaguely, or drop in and find out what there is new in the way of, say, American poetry. Unless the book happens to have been published here by an English publisher, there are comparatively few American books on sale newer than the generation of Longfellow, Emerson, or Walt Whitman. And only the best known of these older works are occasionally available. Not a prominent bookshop that I know of in London has heard of Emily Dickinson, much less has it her poems on its shelves. Yet she lived in the last century and many of us feel that she is far and away the best poet that America has yet produced—some say the only one.
In Paris, on the other hand, there is Brentano's, which, while unsatisfactory enough, at least knows about American books. Better still, on the rive gauche there is Miss Sylvia Beach's " Shakespeare and Co.," one of the best little book- shops I know, where almost any good American or English book, old or new, can be had at once.
Why cannot London, an English-speaking city, do as well as Paris ? Could not the American publishers in London combine to start a bookshop here ? They may reply that there is not sufficient demand for American books in London. Less than in Paris ? But at any rate, could they not set themselves the task of creating a demand ? Moreover, they need not sell only American books. Here it seems would be a really tangible service to the English-speaking world idea.—
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