(2 of 4)
The Author. Arthur Train is a small man, keenly alive to the world about him. He is married, has three daughters and one son. His home is in New York. He is a Harvard graduate, a lawyer, and has passed some tune as Assistant District Attorney of New York. Among his earlier works are The World and Thomas Kelley, The Goldfish, True Stories of Crime, The Earthquake (war book), Tutt and Mr. Tutt (short stories). He is a regular contributor to The Saturday Evening Post.
Some books to have read: Many Marriages (Anderson); Black Oxen (Atherton); Things That Have Interested Me (Bennett); The Enchanted April (Elizabeth); Faint Perfume (Gale); The Middle of the Road (Gibbs).
Book Collecting
The Older and Dirtier, the More Expensive
There are several reasons for collecting old books. One—in some respects the most intriguing—is that they are worth a lot of money. Unhappily there is also to be considered the related fact that they cost a lot unless one is gifted with "flair"—the knack of picking them out of dusty attics or from the clutches of imbecile second-hand dealers. And one usually is not gifted with "flair."
By the simple expedient of calling up a book-seller de luxe, telling him to select you a library, signing a check crowded with zeros, purchasing a fireproof safe lined with shelves, you may acquire Shakespeare folios, pages torn from Gutenberg Bibles, Kelmscott Chaucers, and illuminated manuscripts by the truck load. This is the most practical way of becoming a collector instantaneously.
The only other way is to do your own collecting. And your only purpose in so doing must be that you like having the books. It may be that you are a scholar, and take a naïve delight in contemplation of the comma that was misprinted in the first edition and corrected out of all subsequent ones. Or you may sentimentally rejoice in the reflection that the first owners of the volume in your hands wore knee-breeches and powdered wigs, and were contemporaries of its author. In other words, you may not want the 20th century to shove its typographical nose into your reading of a 16th or 17th century volume.
If you know that that copy of Chapman's Homer was the one which Keats first looked into before writing the sonnet called On Looking Into Chapman's Homer, or that that dark smudge on the otherwise immaculate volume yonder once formed part of Milton's Sunday breakfast, the whole business takes on new aspects.
The collection of books has at least this advantage over any other kind— stamps for example: even if you lose interest in the collection, as such, there is always one last resort—you can read the books. Stamps make very dry reading, and you can't go on indefinitely licking them.
Recent books by the following authors are now current: Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Atherton, Jacinto Benavente, Arnold Bennett, A. E., Elizabeth, Zona Gale, Philip Gibbs, Zane Grey, H. Rider Haggard, Vachel Lindsay, George Jean Nathan, E. P. Oppenheim, George Santayana, and Arthur Train.
Eddie Guest
Ford's Favorite, He Sings and Sells Tears and Red, Red Love