Alice in Authorland.

STUFF and nonsense!” said Alice, to the White Queen, flinging the book on the floor.

“Exactly,” the White Queen replied.

“Haven’t you anything a self-respecting person can read?” Alice inquired.

“A self-respecting person,” answered the White Queen, “would not ask such a silly question. She would accompany me into Authorland and make the acquaintance of the people there and learn to find her way about. Instead,” added the White Queen, cuttingly, “instead of bothering me. I am very busy.”

“Well, if you’re very busy, you won’t want to take me with you and introduce me to all those people,” Alice observed, a trifle sulkily.

“Of course I will!” The White Queen spoke with annoyance but also with cheerfulness, for she prided herself on seldom being one-sided. “I am never too busy to loiter. And let me tell you that when you become too busy to loiter you will find everyone else too lazy to live with—and then what will you do?”

Alice admitted she didn’t know. The White Queen was in a great hurry because, as she said, once in Authorland it would only be possible to make haste slowly. They looked up the timetable and found any number of editions just leaving. As they were entering a compartment the guard came along, crying: “Here! You can’t go in there! That’s reserved for fairies”—but a very pleasant-looking woman who was already seated inside stuck out her head and said: “Oh, do let the little girl come in. Besides, she’s with the White Queen, who may ride anywhere.” So the guard let them in, with a good deal of grumbling, slammed the door and blew his whistle and they were off. The pleasant-faced woman smiled at Alice, and Alice took courage to ask:

“Are you a fairy, then?”

“No, my dear, but I write about them. It’s more fun than being one, really. My name is Rose Fyleman and I live part of the time in London and part of it in Fairy Hills—that’s the nice residence section of Authorland, you know.”

“What are your books, please?” Alice asked, primly.

“Oh, there’s Rose Fyleman’s Fairy Book, and The Fairy Flute, and The Fairy Green and Fairies and Chimneys—all poems—and The Rainbow Cat, whom I knew very well and admired no end. He used to walk about the Child’s Garden of Verse—that’s the little village green with flower-beds in Fairy Hills.”

Rose Fyleman lent Alice some of her books to read on the train. The White Queen slept in a corner, but finally sprang up, crying: “We’re here, we’re here!”

“But the train isn’t stopping,” protested Alice. Rose Fyleman and the White Queen laughed. “Silly,” said the White Queen, “it isn’t a train, it’s an edition, and editions never stop in Authorland. You just jump off anywhere.” And with that she jumped. So did Rose Fyleman, pausing to say: “You won’t mind it. Landing in a heap of books is such fun.” Alice finally summoned her courage and jumped, too. A man six feet tall and over caught her nicely and set her down right side up. Then he very politely introduced himself. He was Frederick Arnold Kummer, he said, and it was his business to catch girls and boys and set them down right side up. “With care,” he added.

Alice thanked him and took the two books he handed her, The First Days of Man and another called The First Days of Knowledge. “You won’t need these here,” he explained, “but you’ll find them very useful and probably interesting and maybe exciting when you go back.”

There was no trace of the White Queen, so Alice went down the road, picking her way among the books planted everywhere, until a white-haired and smiling old lady sent out her boy, Nils, to show her the way about. Nils said the white-haired woman was Selma Lagerlöf, and she had written for him two sets of wonderful adventures. He had been a rather bad boy and Selma Lagerlöf had turned him into an elf and later had sent him through animal land. “I’ll give you the books,” said Nils, picking out a couple that stood between two book ends at corners of the road. “Here they are—The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and The Further Adventures of Nils.”

Alice thought she should like to go back and talk with Selma Lagerlöf, whose smile had seemed mysterious and wonderful, but Nils was bent on showing her the animals. Of these there were quantities, and Nils knew them all, it appeared, and their owners.

“That there’s Brer Rabbit,” he was beginning, when Alice interrupted to say, “You can’t say ‘that there.’” “Yes, I can,” he retorted, “I’ve just said it.” Alice saw he was hopeless, like all boys, and paid no further attention to his grammar, while Nils discussed the creatures, both wild and tame, all about. Some grazed peacefully, some were frisking and playing, and a few gyred and gimbled in the wabe like the slithy toves Alice had heard her friend, Mr. Lewis Carroll, tell about. Brer Rabbit didn’t in the least resemble the White Rabbit, being brown in colour and having no vest pocket with a watch and chain. Uncle Remus and Uncle Remus’s friend, Joel Chandler Harris, kept tabs on Brer Rabbit. Forrestine C. Hooker was feeding lumps of sugar to the Comanche pony named Star that she has written about in Star: The Story of an Indian Pony, and Prince Jan, the St. Bernard of her other book, stood gravely by her. Ernest Thompson Seton, looking more wild than his wildest animals, was racing about, trying to keep track of his grey squirrel, Bannertail, of Krag and Randy and Johnny Bear and Chink, of Lobo, Rag and Vixen, and especially of the Sandhill Stag. “It’s the hardest work,” he assured Alice, stopping for a moment to subdue his hair and wipe his forehead, “to observe all their habits. I simply couldn’t ever do it if I didn’t have wide margins in my books and make a little drawing whenever I noted a new habit. Bad habits in the lefthand margins, good habits in the righthand margins.” “But,” said Alice, wonderingly, “the drawings all look alike to me.” “You might as well say all animals look alike to you,” said Mr. Seton, impatiently. “But they don’t know good and bad, though; all they know is habits. Now, if children only had habits they would be as interesting as animals.” “I’m sure I don’t know,” answered Alice, doubtfully.

Nils had disappeared and the White Queen was nowhere in sight, either. “It’s a strange place,” thought Alice. “It is, indeed,” said a man who was busy painting magnificent pictures in most glowing colours. “It’s strange because no one ever stays long enough to bore you.” “Oh, is that it?” Alice answered. But she was really much impressed. She looked at the gorgeous paintings, each signed “N. C. Wyeth” and each outdoing the one before. She thought with secret ecstasy: “I’m only going to have books with his pictures in them.” Mr. Wyeth, who seemed to understand her thought, said out loud: “You’ll find others—Kay Nielsen and Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac and Noel Pocock.” Alice said, “Yes, no doubt,” but in her own mind she decided it must be because he was as modest as he was wonderful.

“Do you like boys’ stories?” asked a boy much older than Nils, who had come up suddenly. “Of course!” Alice responded. She looked at him more closely. “Why you must be the boy in High Benton, aren’t you?” He grinned. “I guess I am. I was only going to say, if you like boys’ stories—and all the girls I know do—my friend, William Heyliger, has written a new one, The Spirit of the Leader. It’s stuff like High Benton, a high school story. Great!” Alice was about to ask him for the book when all the editions began running past so rapidly that she became dizzy and screamed and shut her eyes. When she opened them a moment later, Authorland had vanished and she was back at her starting place and the White Queen was asking with sharpness:

“Have you been all this time deciding on something to read? You have to read, you know, in order to grow up; and at this rate you’ll never grow up at all!”

Penrod’s Five-Foot Shelf.

Feeling the need of solitude, Penrod Schofield moved slowly toward the barn. As he walked he kicked desultorily at such objects, animate and inanimate, as obtruded themselves in his path—the round top of the water cutoff in the lawn, on which he had broken the blades of the lawn mower last Saturday; a bag of clothes pins reposing harmlessly on its side, and the white cat, Sherlock Holmes. “Ole cat!” Sherlock, untarnished by the hostile toe, trotted off complacently. Creatures like Penrod were little in the life of one who had been victor over the hound of the neighbouring Baskervilles.

Choosing Entrance Two, the youth ascended to Apartment B-3 of the barn, a second-story location offering an outside window with no bath but with proper seclusion. Here on a conscientiously measured shelf of his own manufacture was the beginning of the Penrod Schofield Library. The shelf, constructed in his leisure hours, was exactly five feet in length, a noted educator having assured Penrod and others, through the medium of many full-page advertisements, that the books on a five-foot shelf could furnish the equivalent of a college education. With a passion for exactitude, and in pursuance of a further condition, Penrod was devoting to the books on his five-foot shelf a requisite fifteen minutes a day.

“Five feet divided by fifteen minutes a day makes—makes——.” The youth struggled for a while with this intricate problem in arithmetic, at length muttering: “I know. Y’ count the pages, and then divide by fifteen; no, by the number of pages y’ c’n read in fifteen minutes;—no, that ain’t right either, is it?” There was no answer; there would be none if he looked in the back of one of the books, either; and for a while Penrod had a doubt whether, on looking in the back of the noted educator’s head, any answer would be found there. He did not understand how the educator could possibly be right, nohow, for of course the first and indispensable item for any book shelf was the complete works of G. A. Henty. He ran his eye along these:

Few, but still a beginning. A catalogue recently procured assured him that there were at least thirty-five more that he should possess. Allowing an inch per volume, which he had found necessary, fully three feet of the five must be reserved for the author of By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic and other classical studies in the historical field. Still, the two feet remaining gave probable space for a coupla dozen lesser masterpieces. He examined the volumes already in place:

It had sixteen full-page pictures in colour, lining papers and a coloured title page by Wyeth, and was quite satisfactory.

Penrod had belonged to a troop which had busted up and there was no use joining another as he expected to begin smoking shortly, anyway. However, this book was useful, containing stories and talks on sports and tales of true adventure and Dan Beard’s camping stuff and “Boys Who Have Made Good” and a bunch of funny stories and—best of all—all about radio.

This was a brand-new, regular hot story about Stuart Harven captaining the football team at Manning School and his roommate, Neal Orr, and other fellows. Penrod regarded it as a slick story and nobody was going to borrow it from him for a darn good long while because it was brand-new and a hot story.

One of those he-men, you said it, this Albert Payson Terhune and two-fisted and all, and writes the grandest dog stories a fellow ever gets hold of, no Black Beauty here-nice-doggie story but a corkin’ story about how Jamie Mackellar, a plucky little truck driver, mortgages his truck to own a fine th’rough-bred collie and the kennel owner who is a crook stings him bad; but the measly pup runs away and lives wild and grows a wonderful bone and coat; and then Jamie captures him back and takes him to the show and what Jamie and the dog do to that crook kennel owner is some cautionary warning to all crooks.

This here’s a good sea story, especially when they get shipwrecked on the desolate Crozet Islands and make a wonderful escape, hard to believe but it musta been so, because Kenlon he comes to New York later and sees a fire panic in a theatre and that turns him to be a fireman. Now he’s Chief of the New York City Fire Department, can you beat it? What wouldn’t I give to ride to a four-alarm fire with him, going like mad!

Things in this story of Kim I don’t just get hold of, but it’s a great story all right and I’ve read it twice and I bet I read it some more. Got to get the Jungle Books and Captains Courageous to put alongside it. Certainly Kipling’s the real thing, most especially on India.

Well, of course. A fellow’d have to have that, and the on’y thing was to get hold of the other, The Boy’s Second Book of Inventions it was called, to go with it. Couldn’t have too many books like that which besides being useful, and the kind you c’n always get your folks to give you for presents, was interesting, like most of the books they give hardly ever are.

Penrod reflected. No use to worry. He had room for ’most twenty more books, anyway, allowing for Henty; and when he had read some of these enough he could give one away now and then. Or maybe start a circulating library, a cent a week, which would leave room on the shelves and bring in money for new books.... From the distance came a voice: “Penrod!” His mother was calling, and as it unquestionably was a call to supper, perhaps he had better respond. He moved away. “Gosh, my fifteen minutes was gone an’ I never read anything. Takes fifteen darn minutes a day deciding what to read. Maybe she’s got strawberry shortcake I c’d eat five feet of that no trouble at all!”

Books for Alices and Penrods.

It has become the fashion to try to classify books for boys and girls by ages, but as children’s mental ages, tastes, interests and other details vary not less widely than adults’, it is much more discreet to arrange the “juveniles,” so-called, by general characters. Books not explicitly named above are included in the following very limited and rather carefully chosen groups:

All About Animals.

Introducing Fairies.

The Most Wonderful Pictures.

The Outdoor Life.

Fiction.

Mainly Historical.

Inventions, Games, Plays, and the Fascinations
of Science.

Three Books for Parents.