SCOTTISH BOOKS
SCOTLAND 1938 . Edited by John R. Allan
Nineteen thirty-eight will probably be a bumper- year for the Prinee-Charlie- and-Highland-cattle type of book, but the visitor to the Glasgow Exhibition will be in far safer hands if he plumps for Scotland 1938 (Oliver and Boyd, 6s.). Twenty-one Scots, who live and work in Scotland, tell you how their country- men live learn, work, eat, drink and play ; what social taboos they observe, what jokes they think funny ; what they do on feast days and on Saturday nights. There is not much about the Highlands ; for the book is concerned with people rather than landscape and the High- lands, though chock-full of scenery, can give a living to very few people—and it will not harm the Exhibition visitors to realise this. The contributions are uneven—some of the impressions of town and countryside are rather fiat, and William Power's "They Wrote About Scotland" is little more than an undiscriminating catalogue of names. But James Bridie writes wittily on "Urban Manners and Customs," Ian Macpheison has "a very solid chapter on Country Trades, Robert Hurd is excel- lent on recent building, and James Fergusson has a charming account of his ancestor, Sir Adam Fergusson of Kilkerran, one of the " improving " Lowland lairds who did so much to change the face of Scotland in the eighteenth century.
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