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WALDO R. BROWNE

"The Prince of Humbugs" comes to life in this new edition of his autobiography which has long been out of print. Waldo R. Browne has condensed the many editions into a comprehensive and entertaining volume. He has restored delightfully candid passages which Barnum suppressed in his more respectable old age. The result is a fine reprint of an American biographical classic: a chronicle of the nineteenth century which holds a mirror up to our own times. Octavo. 462 pages. Illustrated. $3.00

WORKING

BULLOCKS

by KATHARINE SUSANNAH PRICHARD

The tenacious love of a man of the woods for his woman, the struggle of man to conquer the trees, the fight of a mother to guard her sons these elemental impulses are invested with new meaning, life, and beauty in a surging novel of Australia. $2.00

THE

MARIONETTE

by EDWIN MUIR

People pitied him and he shunned people. So Hans, the fragile man child, found his solace in a marionette. Edwin Muir has woven a fantasy from the loom of dreams. It is a fabric of delicate but firm weave, distinctly for the literary connoisseur. $1.75

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God's Trombones

SEVEN NEGRO

SERMONS IN VERSE

by JAMES WELDON JOHNSON

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"One of the most remarkable and moving poems of its type ever written in America," says H. L. Mencken of Go Down, Death, one of the seven poems contained herein. The spirited and characteristic sermons of the Negro preachers are much a part of our national folk literature as spirituals. Mr. Johnson has turned them into poetry which will survive by reason of its content and of its quality. Some of the titles are: The Creation, Go Down, Death, Judgment Day, The Prodigal Son and The Crucifixion. Illustrated by Aaron Douglas. $2.50

THE VIKING PRESS

PUBLISHERS

30 IRVING PLACE

NEW YORK

and imaginative mind, giving them a coherence, a relevance, a meaning, which for most of us they would otherwise lack. In the light of this achievement, the weight of his authority among reflective people is not a matter for wonder.

NEWTON ARVIN

Hawkers and Walkers in Early America: Strolling Peddlers, Preachers, Doctors, Players, and Others, from the Beginning to the Civil War, by Richardson Wright. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co. 1927. 8vo. xvi+256 pp. Illus. $4.50.

THE best review of Mr. Wright's book would be a reprint of the Index, but even that fills twentysix large pages printed in double columns. For it is a veritable encyclopædia of vagabondage, as well as a history of primitive commerce, in which every kind of itinerant is carefully studied, the contents of his pack or wagon or boat examined, all his shifts and devices noted. There are hints here for a hundred novels, a thousand short stories, an epic of the Open Road.

I do not see how anybody at least, any man - could read Hawkers and Walkers without some twinges of envy, both of the author for having thought of compiling it, and of the vagabonds he describes. It must have furnished a glorious hobby, this gathering of what our forefathers would have called 'the quaint, the curious, and the quizzical,' from a thousand sources, most of them old books of travel, local histories, private journals and letters, and defunct magazines. It is a species of adventuring almost as exciting as that of the Colonial traders, and much less dangerous. For research, when pursued with enthusiasm, is a kind of detective work, in which clues lead one into all sorts of strange places, a kind of hunting in which one may arouse a long-hidden quarry in every thicket. Mr. Wright has unearthed many a queer custom and many a queerer customer.

His purpose being primarily historical, he has been concerned first of all with accumulating facts; but from among the facts emerge a troupe of pilgrims as various, as picturesque, as those of Canterbury. One can read of folk as different as Bishop Asbury and Johnny Appleseed; Phineas Barnum, showman, and John Bartram, botanist; Nicholas Culpepper, physician, who was the last to teach the Doctrine of Signatures, and John Fitch, inventor, who sold beer at Valley Forge; Gustavus Hesselius, artist, who could paint anything from a house to a ‘landskip,' and Lambert, strong man, who could hold four persons at arm's length'; William Augustus Bowles, 'Ambassador of the United Nations of the Creeks and Cherokees,' and Stephen Burroughs, black sheep, who tried his hand at counterfeiting, preaching, jailbreaking, and school-teaching, in turn, to die at last highly respected, surrounded by books and scholars.' Indeed, there is no end. I have been able to think of no important omission except the wandering naturalists, like Audubon, and they were not primarily engaged in trade. And if one prefers to know what were the street cries of two centuries ago, who first walked the tight rope, who invented the Canestoga wagon and the stogie, how much it cost to send a letter from Boston to Portland, and who were the famous silhouette cutters of 1800 it is all here, for there is hardly a page without its curious fact or fancy.

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The books selected for review in the Atlantic are chosen from lists furnished through the courteous coöperation of such trained judges as the following: American Library Association Booklist, Wisconsin Free Library Commission, and the public-library staffs of Boston, Springfield (Massachusetts), Newark, Cleveland, Kansas City, St. Louis, and the Pratt Institute Free Library of Brooklyn. The following books have received definite commendation from members of the Board:

First Crossing of the Polar Sea, by Roald Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth
The conquest of the Arctic by air

New Essays and American Impressions, by Alfred Noyes
Poems and essays by an Englishman who understands us

Colonel Bob Ingersoll, by Cameron Rogers
The biography of a great American liberal

The Lost Adventurer, by Walter Gilkyson
The story of a man who championed lost causes

The Old Stag, by Henry Williamson

GEORGE H. DORAN CO. $5.00

HENRY HOLT & Co. $2.50

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & Co. $3.00

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS $2.00

in Pennsylvania and in Spain

Twelve sensitive stories of the birds and beasts of England

E. P. DUTTON & Co. $2.50

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Innocents Aboard. Two in a Junk.

The Bounds of Decency.

The Wreck of the Memphis.

The Russian. A Story

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