The Saturday Book. Edited by John Hadfield. (Hutchinson. 25s.) "This
twelfth annual issue of the Saturday Book," reads a note facing the decorative title-page, "has been designed by Lawrence Scarfe, Edwin Smith, and the Editor." The verb is justly chosen, for this yearly miscellany is, as always, shapely as well as sumptuous. Its founder, Mr. Leonard Russell—for eleven years its editor—set the pattern, which Mr. John Hadfield has followed, of a, collection of stories and articles, poems and pictures, that should have style and personality. This year the sea and the seaside provide the theme for a lively album of shells and pebbles, pierrots and picture-postcards, and for prose from Mr. Derek Hudson and Sir Compton Mackenzie. There are continental excur- sions to Paris with a sketch-book, and to Rome with a camera; verses from Mr. Christopher Morley; a half-dozen short stories and as many factual essays that range from the lively life of Colette to the simple reminiscences of an Army batman. Essayists and photographers make forays into the nineteen-twenties, and the fascinated reader may flip the pages from the restless pictures of flappers Charlestoning to the stately conversation-pieces of Arthur Devis, most handsomely reproduced, and presented, as handsomely, by Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell. it would be a remarkably confined taste that found nothing of interest in this generously- planned latter-day keepsake; most people will find it all enchanting. C. R.
Previous page
