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The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:
DR. GRAESLER—Arthur Schnitzler— Seltzer ($2.50). Dr. Graesler, middle-aged physician at a small German health-resort, reserved, dry, serious, melancholy, had never had the success in life that his natural abilities promised. Left alone by the sudden suicide of his sister, he was vaguely drawn into a search for belated romance and spiritual content. Three women crossed his path. He quite intended to marry the first, but they misunderstood each other fatally, and nothing came of it. The second became his mistress—and died of scarlet fever contracted from little Fanny, Frau Sommer's child, a patient of Graesler's. Graesler felt horribly about it—but Frau Sommer was so unostentatiously kind to him that he married her in the end. Precise, ironic, beautifully self-contained, this admirable little novel by the author of the much-discussed Casanova's Homecoming progresses to its odd conclusion with smooth felicity.
THE COLLECTOR'S WHATNOT—Van Loot, Kilgallen and Elphinstone — Houghton Mifflin ($2.50). If you have ever bickered with an antique dealer for a genuine rat-tail spoon or a Jacobean chair that was made in Newark, you will enjoy this hilarious take-off on antiquing and antiquers. The Collector's Whatnot does for the antique-mania what The Cruise of the Kawa did for the South-Sea-craze.
—THE ROVER—Joseph Conrad—Doubleday-Page ($2.00).