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Speaking of Books

A New Literary Department

Edited by FRANCES Lamont ROBBINS

What Everybody Is Reading

TH

are usually
HE books in greatest demand
The following list is
those most discussed.
compiled from the lists of the ten best-sell-
ing volumes sent us by wire by eight book-shops
each week. These particular book-shops were
chosen because we think that they reflect the
tastes of the more representative readers. These
shops are as follows:

New York-Brentano's.
Boston-Old Corner Book Store.
Rochester-Scrantoms Inc.
Cleveland-Korner & Wood.
St. Louis-Scruggs, Vandevoort
& Barney

Denver-Kendrick Bellamy Co.
Houston-Teolin Pillot Company.
San Francisco-Paul Elder & Co.

Fiction

Little, Brown &
"Jalna," by Mazo de la Roche.
Co.
A clannish family in Canada survives
affairs of
the potentially disrupting love
several members. If you like a good story,
peopled by startling and brilliant caricatures,
you will enjoy it. Reviewed November 2.
"Adam and Eve: Though He Knew Better," by
John Erskine. The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
You will find this an entertaining satirical
tale dealing with the first companionate and
Reviewed
the first Mr. and Mrs. marriages.
last week.

"Death Comes for the Archbishop," by Willa
Cather. A. A. Knopf. This imaginative
biography of a French missionary bishop to
the Southwest is fine in spiritual concept, rich
in beautiful description and moving charac-
terization. Reviewed October 26.
"Kitty," by Warwick Deeping. A. A. Knopf. A
young wife's struggle against her dominating
mother-in-law for the possession of her hus-
You will
band, set in post-war England.
enjoy it if you like a machine-turned story
with humor and wholesome sentiment.
viewed last week.

"The Vanguard," by Arnold Bennett.

Re

The George

H. Doran Company. Reviewed below.

Non-Fiction

"Trader Horn," by Alfred Aloysius Horn and
The
Ethelreda Lewis. Simon & Schuster.
romantic story of an ancient adventurer, full
of poetry, guileless wisdom, action, informa-
tion, and color. Reviewed November 16.
Little, Brown &
"Bismarck," by Emil Ludwig.
Co. This splendid biography by a master
craftsman is unhesitatingly recommended to
Re-
any one with a taste for solid reading.
viewed November 9.

"Our Times. America Finding Herself," by Mark
Sullivan. Charles Scribner's Sons. This, the
second volume of a social history of our
times, is full of information and entertain-
ment. It is especially valuable in presenting
a study of many elements which have gone
to form the present American attitude toward
life in general. Reviewed last week.
G. P. Putnam's
"We," by Charles A. Lindbergh.
Sons. The young hero's story of his life is a
direct, simply expressed, and often moving
deserves
It
place
permanent
a
account.
Reviewed August 17.
among boys' books.
"Napoleon." by Emil Ludwig. Boni & Liveright.
You will find this engrossing biography a fine
foot-note to the Napoleonic period. Reviewed
November 9.

TH

The Vanguard

HE writer of sober realism, the serious novelist, here turns his hand to light fiction, and the hand which we are accustomed to think of as supremely deft has become heavy, if the fiction is not. The Vanguard is a yacht, the perfection of motor yachts. Its cuisine as described causes the reader's mouth to water; its appointments make him sick for a cushioned steamer chair facing a sunny sea. It belongs to a multimillionaire, a bullying, swearing product of the Five Towns of pleasant

memory,
who has made himself owner of
newspapers, mines, cinemas everything
that can be bought. For the ultimate
purpose of settling a quarrel with his
wife, he abducts a rival millionaire, this
time a gentleman who owns something
that he wants. A young woman whose
charms, although they fairly leap at the
reader from the page, have been unwept
and unsung, gets herself carried off on
the yacht at the same time. A pleasant
sail along Mediterranean coasts and a
visit to Rome end with the quarrel set-
tled to the satisfaction of all concerned,
the rival millionaires satisfied, and the
young lady engaged.

We all remember our delighted read-
ing of the Five Towns novels, and most
of us are old admirers of Arnold Ben-
nett's skill at satiric fantasy. "How to
Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day" and
"Buried Alive" are books to read and
ponder and laugh over again and again.
So it is with a feeling of stupefaction
that this reviewer puts down "The Van-
guard." The book is gay throughout,
and downright funny in spots. It starts
off with a good dash of excitement. It
pictures pleasantly enough the taming
of the millionaire boor, and the capitula-
tion to feminine charms of both the ur-
bane and the vulgar financier, and of the
various secretaries, stewards, wireless
operators, etc. It contains some wise
and spicy comment on humanity in gen-
eral. A book by Arnold Bennett could
do no less. But what of it? Why
should he have bothered to write a book
which, according to the jacket, will "de-
light and thrill" when P. G. Wodehouse
could have made it much funnier and
A. E. W. Mason could have made it
much more exciting. "The Vanguard"
is called a playful and witty romance.
It is playful. It is witty. It is a ro-
mance. And the Literary Guild chose
it for its December book. A puzzled
reviewer can say no more.

Have You Seen These ?

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What are magazine
editors looking for?

Yes, what do they want in a story? What
makes the difference between a printed
rejection slip and a check of acceptance ?
Good ideas-true-to-life characters-cor-
rect technique.

Those are the three things that magazine editors look for and find in the stories and articles they print.

Those are the three essentials to writing success that can best be developed by newspaper training. For proof-consider the scores of "best-selling" authors who began on newspapers. Their ideas and characters are drawn straight from the vivid life they lived. And correct technique comes natural to a man who has written under expert criticism.

And writing is not the only field in which men and women with newspaper training excel. The alert, disciplined mind which a newspaper office fosters is a potent success factor-anywhere. Business executives and public men are constantly looking for the right kind of man or woman with newspaper training.

Real Newspaper Training-by

the New York Copy Desk Method Expert criticism is the keynote of the Newspaper Institute of America's new method of home instruction. In the N. I. A. you work on actual assignments. Every sentence you write is individually edited and constructively criticized by the Institute Copy Desk. A group of New York newspaper men with 182 years of experience behind them are responsible for this instruction. You learn to write by writing (little theory, much practice) just as if you were being broken in on a great metropolitan daily. An intensely practical course for every man or woman with literary ambitions.

Interested? Then you'll be even more interested in our fascinating Writing Aptitude Test, that tells you in advance how greatly this course can really improve your style and increase your pleasure in writing. Fill in and mail the coupon.

Newspaper Institute of America 25 West 45th Street, New York

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polite. Their baskets were delicate and sweet-smelling. The new children peeked around corners when they came to the door; the summer dogs barked. When they stopped coming, the postmaster said: "They're dead. There aren't any Indians in Hancock County any more but I've got Japanese baskets from the five-and-ten."

Old broken Indians selling baskets, tamed Indians shooting up Buffalo Bill's Deadwood Coach, make-believe Indians out of Cooper and Grinnell; unless you are an anthropologist or a home missionary, that is all you know about the only native American. His last days in North America, bloody and awful, his enslavement by Spaniard and Frenchman, the breaking of his spirit by AngloSaxon-this you know. You know the horrors of the Spanish conquistadors in Mexico, of the Creek massacre on the plains. But of the long and brilliant past, the rise and flowering and decline. of civilizations which shade back into antiquity, you know nothing.

Dr. Paul Radin, an anthropologist and a genuine scientist, does, in two recent books, much to enlighten you. In "The Story of the American Indian," following a popular narrative style with perseverance only occasionally cumbersome, he tells of the Amerind races which built up great empires and complex civilizations from their shadowy beginnings to their sharp ends. He speaks only briefly of the conclusions arrived at by science as to the racial beginnings of the Indian, fixing upon the Mongolian invasion as the determining factor in the physical, temperamental, and psychic make-up of the race. In elaborate and vivid detail, using much source material, he traces the culture of the North American tribes through the Mound Builders back to the Mayan civilization of Yucatan, which touched and influenced all the primitive peoples to the north; while the lines of the South American cultures are shown to converge upon Peru, the socialized state.

The quotations of original Indian chants and aphorisms which this book contains give it the quality of an anthology as well as of a popular history, and as such it supplements Dr. Radin's other recent book on "Primitive Man as Philosopher" (Appleton), in which much material from original Winnebago Indian sources is quoted, which shows the Indian intellectual as a moralist and philosopher capable of flights of independent thought which cover a wide range and which establish the existence of an intellectual class among people regarded as savages.

With the addition of two anthologies of Indian poetry, an amateur of aboriginal American culture might make Dr. Radin's books the nucleus for a good library. "The Path on the Rainbow" (edited by G. Cronyn, published by Boni & Liveright, and possibly out of print) was the first collection of Indian poetry

Courtesy Boni & Liveright

A Maya decoration in which the
resemblance to Chinese art is
apparent

(From "The Story of the American Indian ")

in which the images, thoughts, and metrical arrangements of the Indian were re-expressed in English verse. Hartley Alexander in "God's Drum" (Dutton) has attempted the same thing. If every civilization contains in its flowering the seeds of its own decay, Dr. Radin makes very plain how obviously true this is of the Indian races. It is possible, after reading these books, to speculate for one's self upon the picture. Looking at the art and poetry of the Indians, one wonders if they may not be the products of an already effete Oriental civilization, bursting into temporary vigor with the infusion of new, entirely savage blood and falling into quick decay-old wine in new bottles. But this. please, is only the hesitant guess of a reviewer whose Indians, until now, were

old, dirty, and scrupulously polite and sold baskets until they died and the "five-and-ten" took over the trade.

"Seventeen" in Seville

THE BULLFIGHTERS.

By Henry de Montherlant. Lincoln MacVeagh, the Dial Press.

Alban de Bricoule was being prepared for his first communion when his grandmother gave him a juvenile edition of "Quo Vadis;" but he skipped all about St. Peter and became a Roman at heart. His paganism remained entangled with his Catholicism. His mother sent him to Lourdes, "where he could mix with the litter-bearers and derive some spiritual benefit," but he was "a constant nuisance to the litter-bearers." "He was carried away by the thought that he was a great sinner as well as a great Christian." Fortunately, Alban saw a bullfight, and Lourdes knew him no more. "This bull-fight was second of the great revelations of his youth, or rather of his life.

The first had been the revelation

of paganism through a book intended to instruct, the third was the revelation of the flesh through the heart." This Latin Willie Baxter learned to "play the bulls," and went to Spain as an amateur of the sport, in the same spirit "that he - was later to go up to the front for the first time." In Seville his Frühlingserwachen was accomplished somewhere between the violences of Wedekind and the absurdities of Booth Tarkington's adolescent. Alban, melodramatic, a bit ridiculous, a bit pathetic, is still distingué, and at the end magnificent.

Alban's passion for the bulls is interwoven with his love for Solidad, even as it is with his faith. He sees los toros against a rich background of history and mythology, even identifying the god Mithra with Christ. "The fight is an incantation, a rite, a nuptial dance;" "in the silence the bell of the cabestro rang as though for the elevation." To Alban the blood of the slain bulls attains a mystical significance, and when the beast is in extremis Alban is reminded of the Blood of the Lamb. Likewise when meeting Solidad he notes that "at the bottom of her short skirt-her petticoat showed golden red, like the raw wound of a bull."

This study of a sensitive boy at a period when his enthusiasms approach hysteria is lightened by the author's humor where it might easily fall into an exploitation of morbid tendencies.

We are told that Henry de Montherlant has been a bull-fighter, but such statistics are unnecessary to prove the authenticity of his Spanish landscape

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with figures. Solidad is that rare thing, a Spanish woman in fiction who is not merely a sort of Italian prima donna dressed up in the mantilla and castanets of Carmen. She stands as definite and Spanish as the portraits of the Maja. Indeed, this book is so vivid that one instinctively thinks of it in terms of paint. The scenes in the bull-ring are as brilliant as the Goya tapestries. "The arena seemed a vat with the ferment rising from the bottom and spilling over the sides. All the spectators rose in their places and the amphitheater frothed and foamed like a great jar of wine."

After killing the bull he had feared above all, Alban was at last released from his obsession, and he returned to France without even a farewell to Solidad. After all, it was not two passions that fired him-only one. Solidad or his toros, it was all the same thing-a part of the disease of being seventeen.

THE

MARY SHIRLEY.

HE editor of this department will glad to help readers with advice and suggestions in buying current books, whether noticed on this page or not. If you wish guidance in selecting books for yourself or to give away, we shall do the best we can for. you if you will write us, giving some suggestions, preferably with examples, of the taste which is to be satisfied. We shall confine ourselves to books published within the last year or so, so that you will have no trouble in buying them through your own bookshop.

The Old Christmas Magic

(Continued from page 536)

children to throw about the details of life in a mechanical age the light of romance and the magic of folk-lore. I have not yet heard from the children themselves, for example, whether they find that "A Merry-Go-Round of Modern Tales," by Caroline Emerson (Dutton), invests the typewriter, the motor truck, and the steam-roller with the attributes of fairyhood. I do not see why this should not be acceptable to children, every one of whom at all imaginative has at some time played out dramas of family life with plain bone buttons and informed the five fingers of his hand with distinct personalities. I only wish that when verses are written about dumb-waiters and fire-escapes, such as are in James Tippett's "I Live in a City" (Harper), they would not be quite such pedestrian poetry. But it is not at all a bad idea to find your fireescape flowering into rhyme when you are little; rhyme should be at home in he house. Nor is it impossible to use

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for this purpose pictures so modernistic as those of Boardman Robinson, who makes an unexpected and refreshing appearance as illustrator of the "Rhymes of If and Why," by Betty Sage (Duffield)-rhymes that celebrate a child's idea of city and seashore, batter-cakes at Child's, and boasts about adenoids. It is a trifle depressing, though, to reflect that pictures and print together present a metropolitan American child's vision of a garden of verse.

Wonder tales may or may not make terms with natural history. Mrs. Bradley's story of "Alice in Jungleland" (Appleton), her own little girl's wonderful trip through Africa, certainly does. Peggy Bacon's "The Lion-Hearted Kitten" (Macmillan) certainly does not. No animals act like these charming and vigorous creatures; pictures and story together, they are dream cats and hippos and what-not, gentle enough to mingle with a child's dreams, for they are bedtime stories. Helen Fuller Orton's "Prancing Pat" (Stokes) is about an actual horse, for at the age for which it is meant, the time of life when one begins to read, the peculiar charm of the horse has by no means waned. At this time, and keeping the needs of the new reader in mind, come Mildred Batchelder's "Peggy Stories" and "Topsy Turvy Tales" (Scribner's), about the life that little children lead. The doll's-house people appear in "The Popover Family," by Ethel Calvert Phillips (Houghton Mifflin).

There are plenty of animals in the charming series known as "The Little Library" (Macmillan) because the volumes are of the right size and shape to fit a little hand, and, I am happy to find, with type of a size and shape to fit a young eye. In this series (ranging in age one step below the same house's "Children's Classics" of old favorites) are "The Good-Natured Bear," "The Cat and the Captain"-and what a cat!

and a French rabbit to go with the famous English "Peter" of Beatrix Potter, Alice Dussanze's "Little Jack Rabbit."

A little older, and one comes to the age when the Beacon Hill Bookshelf, published by Little, Brown & Co., may be drawn upon by parents in search of certified favorites, sure that whatever book they may choose from it will have a welcome from a normal child. Here are newly illustrated (color) editions of such Louisa Alcott stories as hold their own against newcomers, of Susan Coolidge's "What Katy Did," and Mary Wells's "Jolly Good Times," written in and about the Massachusetts countryside fifty years ago and showing no sign of age. There have been several rediscoveries this year, and one of these at least is a blessed boon: Stokes has brought out Frank Stockton's "The Poor Count's Christmas" just as it was in the prehistoric days of "St. Nicholas" -so long ago that for years bits of its pictures figured in the patchwork of old illustrations that made the enthralling

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Scientific Facts

About Diet

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end-papers of this magazine's bound volumes. I thought the tale was lost, and here it is, like Kate Nickleby's miniature, "unmoved, unchanged," this being the quality of good miniatures and of really good books for children.

Yet a little older, and one is old enough for "Gay Neck," a most unusual and distinguished book, the story of a carrier pigeon in the Great War and after, told by Dhan Gopal Mukerji and embellished by the decorations of Boris Artzybasheff. Here is a book of beauty every way you look at it; the tale carries more of the philosophy of Mr. Mukerji and of the East-than one would believe possible from this brief description, or that would have been intrusted to such young readers not so long ago. But we have come to realize that young minds take in great ideas if they come simply, without parade, and at the time of life when minds are naturally hospitable. There is a rush of books for this time of life-the teens; far more than there need be, for by this time a young person should at least be tasting more than just the books prepared with his age in mind. But a story as robust and honest as Caroline Snedeker's "Downright Dencey" (Doubleday, Page) is worth reading by any girl; there's an excellent dog story called "Sarah's Dakin," by Mabel Robinson (Dutton), who wrote "Dr. Tam O'Shanter;" a wholesome story of family life is in Christine Whiting Parmenter's "The Real Reward" (Little, Brown); "The White Pony in the Hills," by Anne Bosworth Green (Century), is a fine outdoor story of a Vermont stock farm; there are two travel stories of young Americans in Europe (always popular when the family is thinking of going abroad)"The Carter Children in France," by Constance Johnson (Dodd, Mead), and Hildegarde Hawthorne's "Deedah's Wonderful Year" (Appleton); Alida Malkus's "Raquel of the Ranch Country" (Harcourt, Brace) is thrilling, romantic, and accurate in its local color; and in "Girl Scout Stories," edited by Helen Ferris (Doran), one may find a collection of stories such as girls have chosen for themselves, reflecting credit on their taste.

Boys have new adventure stories, such as "Jinglebob," by Philip Ashton

The Pratt Teachers Agency Rollins (Scribner's); "The Jinx Ship,"

70 Fifth Avenue, New York

Recommends teachers to colleges, public and private schools.

EXPERT SERVICE

SCHOOL

by Howard Pease (Doubleday, Page); Perry Newberry's "Forward Ho!" (Stokes); Theodore and Winifred HarGold" (Doubleday, Page); "Tawny: A Dog of the Old West," by T. C. Hinkle (Morrow); and the crowded and explosive pages of Con

The BUCK HILL SCHOOL per's "Siberian

In the Pocono Mountains

BUCK HILL FALLS, PENNSYLVANIA A Progressive Boarding School for Girls and Boys Elementary. College Preparatory. Special attention to diet and health. Outdoor life and winter sports. NELL MOORE CAROLYN NELSON BRITTON

stance Lindsay Skinner's South American thriller, "The Tiger that Walks Alone" (Macmillan). All of these are well written and guaranteed not spoiled by the intrusion of girls or goo. "The Trade Wind," by Cornelia Meigs, the story winning the large prize offered by Little, Brown & Co., and her other historical story of this year, "As the Crow Flies" (Macmillan), will be welcomed by boys and girls, the chances in favor of boys liking it rather better. This is true too of "Gesser Khan," a resplendent hero book by Ida Zeitlin (Doran), whose "Skatzi" is still attracting attention a year after its first appearance; the pictures in the new book about Tibet, though as remarkable in their own way, are not in the least like those in the earlier book. Either boy or girl would respond to the beauty of the story of Nathan Hale, told by Laurie Erskine in "After School" (Appleton) so simply and with such feeling that it deserves a permanent place in school and family libraries.

"I Know a Secret," by Christopher Morley (Doubleday, Page), belongs in the class popularly known as "ageless," about children and loved above all others by imaginative children, readable at any time of life, and revealing deeper meanings the longer one lives. Laura Spencer Portor's "The Little Long Ago" (Dutton) is a book of this sort, a remembered childhood that a somewhat introspective child will appreciate and that any par ent could take to himself with profit. "The Winged Horse," by Auslander and Hill (Doubleday, Page) is a history of poetry for young people, but it will be read before this next year is out by more grown-ups than children. As for Barbara Follett's "The House Without Windows" (Knopf), it is a window lifted. for a brief and blinding moment, into a world unsuspected because it is by grown-ups quite forgotten-the world before the shades of the prison house begin to close, when for a little while a little girl may be more fay than humar.. Barbara Follett, the little girl who wrote it, may go on to write books even mor remarkable, but should she write n more than this, she will have justified the typewriter upon which this tale was. according to the record, tapped into be ing. There may be, it appears, magic in anything, and a glamourous tale like th can come clicking straight from keyunder the fingers of a child. It all de pends upon the spirit, and it is wor while making some effort to protect th in this season of Christmas, from stiflir. under a load of things all too real things that one may buy and break.

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of us with THE genius of America expresses itself in many ways, but in none more effectively than in raising the general standard of living. The best scientific, inventive, and artistic brains in America are being applied to the production of things that minister to our comfort, our amusement, or our sense of beauty.

The editors believe that no view of current affairs is complete that does not include some account of these things.

modernistic furniture and house furnishings has been limited to a glimpse in a shop window or the pages of a magazine of a few bizarre pieces which looked like nothing so much as the relics of an explosion in a trigonometry factory. We may rather have liked the things, at that, but we couldn't quite see them among the overstuffed furniture and inherited Victorianisms of our own homes. And probably we have indulged in a hearty laugh at their eccentricity, and passed on.

It is conceivable that in another decade or two we will get just as hearty a laugh out of some of the pieces which now grace our bed and dining and living

rooms.

which you would not think freakish, which would not make you think first of all of its eccentricity. Ourself, we do like some of the more startling pieces and arrangements. But it is true that you cannot introduce them all by themselves into the usual American interior. And so we waited until

found something not too startling.

we

A modern treatment throughout of bedroom, living-room, and dining-room is being shown in three model rooms at Macy's. This furniture has been reproduced from originals made by one of the best modern French designers. It is new, and any new thing is difficult at first to accept; but it is so pleasing, so sensible, and so unobtrusive that we be

a quarter-circle. In the middle is a tall mirror, only the lower half of which has a frame. There is an upholstered "bathtub chair," and a bureau or chest of drawers over which hangs a mirror, the lower half of which has a frame of what might be aluminum. None of the furniture has any moldings or beadings or ornamentation, but depends on the wood itself and the finish and the sweep of its clean lines for its beauty.

In the living-room the furniture— desk, bookcase, sofa, stand-are of palisander, a kind of rosewood, inlaid with ivory. The fireplace is low and wide, of brown brick and brown marble, over the full width of which is a mirror that goes to the ceiling. There is no restlessness, no waste motion, in this room. Everything does what it is intended to do quietly and efficiently. The lighting is done by lamps concealed in wall columns of translucent glass. The colors are all shades of brown.

Do we make you see these rooms at all? Probably not. You cannot describe this new furniture in terms of the old. Here are no Windsor chairs, no fourposter beds, nor anything resembling them. We have no vocabulary for these things yet. But it will not be long before we have one. Modernist furnishings have come to stay. Beauty, simplicity, and adaptability to use these three things are the criteria by which we select our furniture, and only the most hidebound conservatism can prevent us from seeing that the best of modernist furnishings combines them all. And variety. There is more variety than there ever was before. And some of it is very bizarre. We have seen—and admired-pieces that looked like a geometrician's nightmare. We shall describe some of them from time to time. For we believe that you will admire them

too.

Many of them not all, of lieve few people would find it unsuitable. MUCH the same reason that held us

course are clumsy and dreary and over-ornamented. And very, very badly designed. And the best of the modernistic stuff, for all its use of curious materials, its angularity, and its lack of politeness to tradition, is restful, quiet, and pleasant to live with. And what is most important of all-suited exactly to the purpose for which it is to be used. Which is a good deal more than can be said for many of the old Period pieces, as any man knows who has sat on, eaten from, or slept in them.

For some time we have been planning this modernistic outburst in our department, but we have felt that we should wait until we could talk of something

To describe it to you is not so easy. The bedroom first. Everything here is low, making the room look much larger than it really is. The headboard and footboard of the bed curve up from underneath, each a perfectly plain, unornamented piece of glossy maple, much lighter in color than the old-fashioned bird's-eye maple. At either side of the bed is a semicircular table of the same wood with two drawers, one on each side, and below a sort of cupboard without doors for books and what not. The dressing-table has no legs and the top is but a few inches from the floor-a plain but a few inches from the floor-a plain piece of maple which curves up at each side. In the curve are three drawers in

back from writing about modernistic furnishings has kept us from touching on automobiles. We have been waiting for the Automobile Show. When that event takes place, we shall report it for you, and thereafter shall continue to report the progress of the motor world in the last issue each month.

There will be nothing technical about our reports. We don't know enough. We don't understand the gasoline engine, and we don't want to. It is enough if it runs smoothly. We believe that you are like us in that respect. We don't know much about automobiles, but we know what we like, and we shall report them for you in that way. W. R. B.

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