2 JULY 1965, Page 20

The House of Words Sad to see Macm illans, the

publishers, moving from their splendid Victorian premises in St. Martin's Street to the Strand. The firm had been in St. Martin's Street, overlooking the National Gallery, since 1897—and in its day the building was thought to be the last word in publisher's architecture, with its vast storage well which could hold a million books. Best known of all perhaps, were those oak-lined corridors, which Yeats, Kipling, Hardy, and Charles Morgan perambulated, and which in later years at any rate packed busts of Shakespeare and `Mr. Harold.' Alas, the building, it seems, was no longer big enough; the books have already been moved to a country warehouse; and soon the House of Words, as Mr. Lovat Dickson called it, will disappear in dust.