As every publisher knows or thinks he knows, books sell poorly in the summertime, so new books are held off the market until Labor Day, then dumped into bookstores in a glut. This sales philosophy is at least debatable—e.g., with close to 900 titles scheduled for publication in September alone, a good many are bound to be overlooked by readers. But the first fall outpourings do show what authors have been up to, and this week's list contains something for everybody. A sampling:
Harvard Historian Samuel Eliot Morison has taken a short leave of his massive history of the U.S. Navy in World War II to assemble a collection of his historical essays, By Land and by Sea (Knopf). Written with his usual clarity and common sense, they range in subject from the clipper ships of Massachusetts to history as a literary art, a piece that should be required reading for all academic historians.
New Zealander Antony Alpers has also written a book that will become required reading of a sort. His literary biography, Katherine Mansfield (Knopf), is a conscientious job laced with fresh facts about a writer whose real career was neurotic self-destruction. Another literary collection of the season sells for only 35¢ : in New Poems (Ballantine), Rolfe Humphries has gathered some 200 poems by more than 50 fellow practitioners, many famous (Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore), many virtually unknown.
For those who like a cozy novel with a basically predictable outcome, there is Elizabeth Goudge's The Heart of the Family (Coward-McCann). Author Goudge has a highly developed bestseller touch, and her simple story of family life in England is just what her fans might have ordered. As far from the Goudge world as possible is the African world of First Novelist Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (Grove), a world of myth, legend and fantasy. The language is odd and flavorsome, as befits a book whose hero drinks 225 kegs of palm wine every day.
Just as offbeat, but with a U.S. setting, though it might be anywhere, is Oscar Tarcov's first novel, Bravo My Monster (Regnery). Tarcov is no Franz Kafka, his obvious master, but his symbol-laden story of a man imprisoned in his own home by a monster generates high tension.
Some good reading that could easily be lost in the whirl is Giovanni Verge's Little Novels of Sicily (Grove). Verga, who died in 1922, was one of Italy's great writers, and these strong, tender stories of life at its most universal levels are among his best. After Verga, Frenchman Gil Buhet's The Innocent Knights (Viking) may seem like Gallic fluff. Actually, it is a charming story about a gang of schoolboys who shut themselves up in a moated ruin until their unjust elders and schoolmasters are ready to treat them like human beings.