My own firm has published, so far this year, sixty-
two books. No fewer than nine of them have gone out to the reviewers with fungi attached (whether 'of worthless if not actually poisonous content' it is not for me to say): the purveyors being Mr. Angus Wilson, Mr. Gerald Brenan, Mr. John Cowper Powys, Miss Santha Rama Rau, Miss Daphne du Maurier, Miss Elizabeth Jenkins, the Astronomer Royal Emeritus (for a book on Mars), Canon Collins (for a book on St. Paul), Sir John Rothenstein (for a book on art), Mr. Christopher Mayhew (for a book on a drug he has experimented with) and Mr. James Laver, Lady Pamela Berry, Madame Fath (for a technical book on fashion). In addition, fungi have been reproduced from the American jacket of an American book, previously published over there, about con- temporary France : the manufacturers being Mr. Averell Harriman, Mr. John Gunther, Mr. Ed Murrow and Miss Janet Flanner.
All the above, it so happens, were good enough to make us free of their opinions without any cash con- sideration: possibly because, with naive disinter- estedness, they were anxious that work they thought well of, by authors either wholly unknown or very little known here, should not be overlooked. But what disturbs us is that, if we approached others more eminent than the above, crippling fees might be payable. •
For consider our difficulty. There has never been
steel
P) at
uary..
of e first
orts a
versea
,seater more
The influence of T,V.
Previous page
