TED OLSON, who wrote the poem, "For an Argonaut, Age Seven," which was printed in Sunset for September, was born in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1899, spent his early years on a cattle ranch, and was graduated from the University of Wyoming. Since then he has been engaged in newspaper work in Denver, Oakland, Calif., San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere. At present he is on the staff of the Casper (Wyoming) Tribune. He has contributed prose to Harper's Magazine, Sunset, and several of the fiction magazines, and verse to the Saturday Evening Post, Ainslee's, Contemporary Verse, the Measure, the Lyric West, the Overland Monthly, and other mag

azines. On the strength of a year's residence in San Francisco, Mr. Olson was given representation in "Continent's End: An Anthology of Contemporary California Poets," recently published by the Book Club of California. As to his methods of writing, Mr. Olson says: "My methods? Catch a phrase, a line, a mood, a rhythm, and build a poem about it. Sometimes it's easy; sometimes the crude skeleton of it haunts me for months or years before I can flesh it and breathe life into the corpse. The two terminal lines of 'For an Argonaut, Age Seven', was in my notebook for close to a decade before the rest of the poem grew around them.”

Something like ten per cent. of these manuscripts came from agencies, or from writers who already had appeared in the magazine. For convenience sake, and not as a matter of qualitative analysis, these are routed "first class," and escape the preliminary inspection of the first Readers. All others are "second class," and must start at the bottom of the ladder.

About four per cent. of the thirty thousand, or one in twenty-four, were accepted for publication. Among this four per cent. were sixty-three writers who made their début in the Post, most of whom were unknown to the staff until then. This was exclusive of Short Turns and Encores and other departments.

But trivial, illiterate, illegible, juvenile, or what, each manuscript and letter received demands and gets the Reader's careful attention, and is returned promptly, and often with a personal letter instead of a printed slip.

It is Mr. Lorimer's creed that any one who is sufficiently interested in the Post to write us a letter or offer us a manuscript has placed the staff in his or her debt, and is entitled to the best that we can give.

In the carrying out of this policy, the staff

acknowledges almost as many manuscripts by letters as by printed rejection slips. This, and the fact that the bulk of the rejections are in the return mail within forty-eight hours after receipt, has created a volume of good will among our correspondents that is not the least of the magazine's assets. Other magazines use rejection slips almost entirely, and some are notorious for holding manuscripts for weeks without acknowledgment.

An analysis of last year's files indicated that ninetyfour per cent. of the thousands who sent in manuscripts during 1924 gave up after one failure. Less than two per cent. made more than two trials.

Writing successfully for even the current periodicals is a highly skilled and specialized task, necessitating a foundation of burned midnight oil, knowledge of life and human nature, a modicum of familiarity with the markets, and more than a dash of education.

Genius that flames up overnight, into national incandescence, is as rare as successful sovietism; but most of us are sure, way back in the back of our minds, in the place where we keep our "selfdelusions" stored, that we are endowed with that spark which, properly nourished, would win national recognition for us. Unfortunately for most of us, we have never learned the line of distinction between talking and saying something. A story may come to us, clothed in tinseled trappings of style and rhetoric, it may be told in melodious words, and have all the good points "of some one else's work" (and often does) and still be merely a poor little tale, all dressed up with no place to go. Again, a

manuscript may have virility, raw native strength and power, and be as simple, as natural as life itself, and because of crudity of form, of disjointed construction, and painfully apparent amateurishness, fail to ring the bell.

But the thrill of picking just one of the sixty-three new writers who made the Post last year out of the avalanche of manuscripts more than compensates for the drudgery of reading the worst of them. -W. Thornton Martin, first Reader for the Saturday Evening Post.

Pronunciation of Authors' Names. - The Haverhill, Massachusetts, Public Library has been gathering information about the pronunciation of authors' names, and publishes this list, in which accented syllables are printed in capital letters:

Stacy Aumonier

John Ayscough

Stephen Benét

Vicente Blasco-Ibanez

Johan Bojer

Phyllis Bottome

Van Wyck Brooks

Heywood Broun

John Buchan

James Branch Cabell

Willa Cather

Mary Cholmondeley
Padraic Colum

Royal Cortissoz
Maud Diver

John Dos Passos
Fedor Dostoievski
Lord Dunsany
St. John Ervine
John Galsworthy
Katherine F. Gerould
Arthur Guiterman
Joseph Hergesheimer
Ralph Hodgson
Emerson Hough
A. E. Housman
James G. Huneker
Sheila Kaye-Smith
William LeQueux
Gaston Leroux
Vachel Lindsay

Arthur Machen

("Cabell" like "rabble"),

(Put an Irish "h" in "matther" and rhyme it with "that").

(CHUM-li),

(PAHD-ric Colm),
(Cor-TEE-suz),
(long "i"),

("o's" and "a" short),
(Dos-toi-YEF-ski),
(Dun-Sa-ni; long "n"),
(Sin-jun Ervyne),
("Gals" like "hauls"),
(GER-ald),

(GEEter-man; hard "g"),

(4 syllables; "ei" like long "i"),
("Ralph" like "Rayfe"),
("Hough" like "huff"),
(Like "house"),

(HUN-e-ker; short "u"),
(Shee-la Kay-Smith),
(LeCUE),
(Le-ROO),

("Vachel" like "Rachel'"),
(Mak-en; long "a"),
(Mac-KYE),

(MAR-quis; as spelled),
(Mawm),

(Urm-ler),

(O-NIGH-ons),

The Saturday Evening Post Market. - George Horace Lorimer, Editor of the Saturday Evening Post is quoted in the Bulletin of the League of the American Performers as saying:

"We should be glad to have the widest publicity

for the Post's hospitality to new writers. Last fall we made an analysis of the contents of several consecutive numbers of the magazine. Eliminating duplication and counting serials as one insertion, we found that twenty-five per cent of the writers were new to the Post that year; sixty-three per cent of all never had appeared in the magazine prior to 1920, and only nineteen per cent. dated back to the outbreak of the world war. These figures are exclusive of verse, humor, and other departments.

"Last year, sixty-three writers made their début in the magazine. We have passed this mark already this year, and expect to reach one hundred. Almost without exception these finds are made in the routine sifting of the daily mail. We read something like thirty-three thousand manuscripts yearly. The bulk of them are without promise, but the exceptions justify our labor.

"It is curious that the legend that the Post deals only in 'names' should persist in the face of weekly disproof, and of the well known fact that we have consistently opposed the 'contract' system. Without exception no article in the Post ever is bought before reading and no writer's work purchased in advance on 'contract.'

"Old writers constantly are falling by the wayside, and obviously it is necessary to the very life of the magazine that new ones be discovered to replace them. All of the time a part of our staff is given to that search.

"It is only fair to mention, however, that serials are distinctly a secondary interest with us, inasmuch as we print something like eighteen short stories for every novel, and that our serial list is an unwieldly one."

Photostat Copying in Library Research. - The little sign, "Photostat," near the delivery desk of the main reading room in the New York Public Library is every day directing more researchers to timesaving methods. The library's photostat department has become one of its busiest branches. By means of it last year 8,892 separate orders for photostat copies were filled, an order ranging from a copy of one page or illustration, a single print, to an entire book, hundreds of prints. Many were for a list of items from several books. Altogether the prints made by the library's photostat for its readers last year totaled almost 60,000, an average of 200 for every working day.

The enormous increase in the use of the photostat in the last few years has been the subject of considerable comment at the library. More orders are handled in a month now than were handled in an entire year when the service was first offered in 1913. The library had only one machine then, making prints up to 111⁄2 by 14 inches. In 1917 it became necessary to add another machine large enough

to reproduce newspapers and maps; still another small machine was bought in 1921.

At the desk a reference librarian is in charge, with a clerical assistant and a page for messenger duty. Here readers bring passages and articles of which they wish copies; but many patrons, instead of coming themselves, write for this and that. This correspondence is handled through the director's office, where there is an assistant with reference experience who sees that the necessary books are collected from all parts of the library, that the pages to be photographed are marked and that the proper directions are put on the order sheet. The photographing room is manned by a skilled photographer, an assistant and a page.

A roll of sensitized paper is fastened at the back of the photostat, which is a specially constructed copying camera. The paper is unfolded as needed and the sheets are cut off at the right length, dropping into the developing box. Prisms are attached to the lens of the camera to correct the position of the type or figures so that they will appear as in the original, instead of reversed, as in an ordinary negative, and the object to be copied is put under glass on a frame that may be raised or lowered to increase or diminish the size of the reproduction. Positive prints, black on white, are made by rephotographing the negative.

Within a few years, in the opinion of Charles F. McCoombs, Superintendent of the main reading room of the Public Library, the photostat will change many of the present methods of reference work in research libraries. Its possibilities are manifest already. By means of the photostat material is gathered without tax on a reader's time and energy and

without danger of such inaccuracies as unavoidably crop up in handtaken notes. When notes did not suffice the reader had to go to the trouble and expense of seeking out and buying a duplicate of the library's book or magazine he wished to excerpt.

More than half the photostat prints supplied, Mr. McCoombs estimates, are copies of the specifications and drawings of American and foreign patents. Next most numerous are reproductions of pages in periodicals or newspapers. These are ordered by critics, editors, university professors, graduate students, Government officials, and diplomats. Often an engineer or a chemist applies for reproductions, or a private library or an industrial laboratory may ask for an article that appeared in a back number of a technical journal. Family trees and coats-of-arms are copied for genealogists. Banks and social workers ask for photostat copies of statistical tables and Government reports. Musicians, composers, and orchestra conductors use photostats of music out of print or not easily obtainable. In statistics and music it is useful to have a photographic copy that cannot err.

Photostat copies of the library's maps, diagrams, architectural plans, and the engravings and book illustrations are used by artists, architects, landscape gardeners, and designers of furniture, textiles, rugs, and jewelry. Actors, stage managers, and movingpicture directors resort to the photostat for copies of costumes, stage settings, and make-up of historical characters. A copy of any record in the library or any page of a library book may be had in a few hours and sometimes in a few minutes by means of the photostat process.- New York Times.

THE WRITING OF FICTION. By Edith Wharton. 178 pp. Cloth. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1925. Mrs. Wharton is not only a skilful writer of fiction but a thoughtful student of the art and principles of fiction-writing, and what she says is worthy of careful attention. Beginning with a chapter treating of her subject in general, she notes that modern fiction really began when the "action" of the novel was transferred "from the street to the soul," so that it does not date back beyond the seventeenth century, and "is still an art in the making, fluent and dirigible, and combining a past full enough for the deduction of certain general principles with a future rich in untried possibilities." Selection from the mass of material, Mrs. Wharton says, is the first step toward coherent expression, although the nov

elist who applies this rule "is nowadays accused of being absorbed in technqiue to the exclusion of the supposedly contrary element of 'human interest'." "The distrust of technique," Mrs. Wharton goes on to say, "and the fear of being unoriginal — both symptoms of a certain lack of creative abundanceare in truth leading to pure anarchy in fiction, and one is almost tempted to say that in certain schools formlessness is now regarded as the first condition of form." As for originality, Mrs. Wharton says: "Every subject, to yield and to retain its full flavor, should be long carried in the mind, brooded upon, and fed with all the impressions and emotions which nourish its creator. True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long

enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own; and the mind which would bring this secret germ to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience. . . . One good heart-break will furnish the poet with many songs, and the novelist with a considerable number of novels. But they must have hearts that can break."

These considerations lead to the great, the central, matter of subject, and the subsidiary points of form and style, which "ought to spring naturally out of the particular theme chosen for representation. Form might, perhaps, for the present purposes be defined as the order, in time and importance, in which the incidents of the narrative are grouped; and style as the way in which they are presented, not only in the narrower sense of language, but also, and rather, as they are grasped and colored by their medium, the narrator's mind, and given back in his words. . . . . Subject, obviously, is what the story is about; but whatever the central episode or situation chosen by the novelist, his tale will be about only just so much of it as he reacts to. . . . . Any subject considered in itself must first of all respond in some way to that mysterious need of a judgment on life of which the most detached human intellect cannot rid itself, must be, in one form or another some sort of rational response to the reader's unconscious but persistent inner question: 'What am I being told this story for? What judgment on life does it contain for me?' A good subject, then, must contain in itself something that sheds a light on our moral experience."

In her second chapter, "Telling a Short Story," Mrs. Wharton says: "One of the chief obligations, in a short story, is to give the reader an immediate sense of security. Every phrase should be a signpost, and never (unless intentionally) a misleading one. The reader's confidence once gained, he may be lured on to the most incredible adventures — as the Arabian Nights are there to show, but the least touch of irrelevance, the least chill of inattention, will instantly undo the spell."

"It is sometimes said that a 'good subject' for a short story should always be capable of being expanded into a novel. The principle may be defendable in special cases; but it is certainly a misleading one on which to build any general theory. . . . If the subject appears to be adapted to both a short story and a novel, the chances are that it is inadequate to either."

this reflecting mind deliberately, and when this is done to live inside the mind chosen, trying to feel, see, and react exactly as the latter would, no more, no less, and, above all, no otherwise."

There is one curious distinction, Mrs. Wharton says, between the successful tale and the successful novel: "No object in itself, however fruitful, appears to be able to keep a novel alive; only the characters in it can. Of the short story, the same cannot be said. . . . The chief technical difference between the short story and the novel may therefore be summed up by saying that situation is the main concern of the short story, character of the novel; and it follows that the effect produced by the short story depends almost entirely on its form, or presentation. . . . The short-story writer must not only know from what angle to present his anecdote if it is to give out all its fires, but must understand just why that particular angle and no other is the right one."

The first care of the writer of the short story, says Mrs Wharton, should be to know how to make a beginning, to study what the musicians call "the attack." "The rule that the first page of a novel ought to contain the germ of the whole is even more applicable to the short story, because in the latter case the trajectory is so short that flash and sound nearly coincide." . . . If the writer's first stroke be vivid and telling, the reader's attention will be instantly won. The ""Hell," said the Duchess, as she lit her cigar with which an Eton boy is said to have begun a tale for his school magazine, in days when Duchesses less commonly smoked and swore, would undoubtedly have carried his narrative to posterity if what followed had been on the same level."

"The arrest of attention by a vivid opening should be something more than a trick. It should mean that the narrator had so brooded on this subject that it has become his indeed, so made over and synthesized within him that, as a great draughtsman gives the essentials of a face or landscape in a halfa-dozen strokes, the narrator can 'situate' his tale in an opening passage which shall be a clue to all the detail eliminated. The clue given, the writer has only to follow; but his grasp must be firm; he must never for an instant forget what he wants to tell, or why it seems worth telling. And this intensity of hold on his subject presupposes, being the telling of even a short story, a good deal of thinking over." "The precious instinct of selection is distilled by that long patience which, if it be not genius, must be one of genius' chief reliances in communicating itself. On this point repetition and insistence are excusable: the shorter the story, the more stripped of detail and 'cleared for action,' the more it depends for its effect not only on the choice of what is kept when the superfluous has been jettisoned, but

"The effect of compactness and instantaneity sought in the short story is attained mainly by the observance of two 'unities' - the old traditional one of time, and that other, more modern and complex, which requires that any rapidly enacted episode shall be seen through only one pair of eyes.

It should be the story-teller's first care to choose

on the order in which these essentials are set forth." "Nothing but deep familiarity with his subject will protect the short-story writer from another danger; that of contenting himself with a mere sketch of the episode selected . . . but, the phrase 'economy of material' suggests another danger to which the novelist and the writer of short stories are equally exposed. Such economy is, in both cases, nearly always to be advised in the multiplication of accidental happenings, minor episodes, surprises, and contrarieties. Most beginners crowd into their work twice as much material of this sort as it needs. True economy consists in the drawing out of one's subject every drop of significance it can give, true expenditure in devoting time, meditation, and patient labor to the process of extraction and representation."

In her third chapter, on "Constructing a Novel," and the following chapter, "Character and Situation in the Novel," Mrs. Wharton gives expert advice about novel-writing. Her final chapter is an appreciation of the late Marcel Proust, the most eminent of recent French novelists. W. H. H.

TRAINING FOR AUTHORSHIP. By Grenville Kleiser. phonso Smith. 432 pp. Cloth. Boston: Ginn & Company, 1925.

"Training for Authorshop" aims to teach the whole art of writing for publication, beginning with word study and going on to discuss methods of enlarging the vocabulary, phrase-making, sentence-making, word-building, the study of similes, and the development of style. Each of the chapters devoted to these subjects has exercises for students based on the instructions given, and there are long lists of words and phrases, with their meanings, to be studied. Interspersed among these lessons are chapters on Short-story Writing (treating of methods of authors, gathering material, plot, character-drawing, dialog, description, and construction), How to Write a Novel, The Writing of Essays, How to Write History, How to Write Biography, and How to Write the Scenario for a Photo-play, with pages of facsimile typewriting, showing how the scenario manuscript should be prepared. Besides, there are Questions and Answers about literary work, and a chapter on The Bible and Literary Training.

W. H. H.

LITERARY CONTRASTS. Selected and edited by C. Alphonso Smith. 432 pp. Cloth. Boston: Ginn & Company, 1925.

There is no question that, as Professor Smith points out, writers may benefit by comparison and study of literary masterpieces that treat of the same theme or similar themes, or otherwise resemble each other, since critical examination of them shows how different authors treat and develop the same or

similar subject matter, thus throwing light on their literary methods. Professor Smith quotes SainteBeuve as saying that the art of literary criticism consists in comparison, and Taine as saying more definitely: "All the treatises on poetry and the drama put together are not so valuable as the reading of a play of Shakspere and comparing it, line by line, with the Italian tales and the old chronicles which Shakspere had before his eyes when writing." Professor Smith goes on to make a striking comparison by quoting the written suggestions that Seward made for the close of Lincoln's Inaugural Address and Lincoln's wonderful peroration. Seward was a college graduate. Lincoln said: "I never went to school more than six months in my life." Seward, thinking that Lincoln's First Inaugural should end with a flourish, submitted the following:

I close. We are not, we must not be, aliens or enemies, but fellow-countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly, they must not, I am sure they will not, be broken. The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriot graves, pass through all the hearts and all hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.

Here is what Lincoln made of it:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Nothing could illustrate more clearly "Lincoln's taste in the selection and rejection of words, his feeling for sentence structure, his sense of unforced rhythm, and his mastery in rounding a great address to an apt and adequate conclusion." For comparison and contrast, Professor Smith in the parallel selections of which with critical introductions he has made his book, furnishes excellent material. He offers nearly a score of cases of resemblance, reprinting together two or more poems, or short stories, or essays, or addresses, to show their similarity for instance, Longfellow's poem, "The Beleaguered City," which Poe thought was plagiarized from his poem, "The Haunted Palace"; the Funeral Oration by Pericles and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address; and De Maupassant's story, "The Necklace," and Henry James's story, "Paste." In his introduction to the stories by De Maupassant and James, by the way, Professor Smith uses an inspired phrase (here italicized) when he asks the reader to "note the simplicity and directness of Maupassant's words, the unity and coherence