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THE WEEK END BOOK—Edited by Vera Mendel, Francis Meynell, Davia Garnett and John Goss—Dial Press ($2.00). An affable little hydra of the amenities lifts nine heads among common books of the day. Of "pocketable" bulk, it is a creature to fend for its weekending master or mistress against all skulking shapes of boredom, unsociability, indisposedness and even of palatal lassitude and the "thin rheum." Or it is a nine-bladed instrument for amiability, with the stabbing blade—a section of Great Poems—whetted to impale dark toads of the spirit; and the accessories—Hate Poems, State Poems, The Zoo, Songs, Play!, Food, First Aid in Divers Crises—for whittling and tinkering the disposition under circumstances various. Of the Great Poems, that old and unthanked friend of man, Anonymous, wrote many. Ben Jotison, Marvell, Donne, Leigh Hunt, Coventry Patmore, Suckling, Herrick, Vaughan and some men and women of our time are given the merited prominence denied them in more portentous anthologies. Likewise in culling Hate Poems did the editors exhibit a sharp and free taste, with this same predilection for the 17th and 20th Centuries. Rare justice is exhibited in the juxtaposition of Deborah's song from Judges V, with Mr. W. N. Ewer's octosyllabic insolence:
How odd
Of God
To choose
The Jews.
The Zoo might well be enlarged in an-other edition—Lindsay's Little Turtle and much else are missing—but the Songs are all those chantels whereof someone on a houseparty is sure to know a second. There are blank pages inside the back cover for one's own additions to this or any other section. One good British page is left for Train Times.
The games in Play!, though many are new, sound a mite dull, like a governess, as do most games before you begin them. Under Food are some amazing confections, and a note on mice-in-honey. For their homicidal notes on mushrooms and kindred fungi, the editors should at once be prosecuted.
First Aid in Divers Crises gives best this small book's delicate flavor. Here are "cachets," "minims," "possets," "epithems;" here advice against "the popular indulgence of biting off blood blisters" and a course of action "on becoming indifferent to the fate of your ship."
Sherwood Anderson
He is the American Balzac