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AS in the world of finance there are varieties of investment, so in reading. A delicate parallel would be between individual authors and, let us say, the mortgage field; whereas the reader who chooses books included in undertakings like the Lambskin Library, the Murray Hill Library or the Modern Student’s Library is like the man adventuring among well-seasoned bonds. The individual author is the bolder risk, less easily to be abandoned, lacking (usually) the element of diversification; the certainty of interest from those carefully selected Library volumes is somewhat greater and the investment in them is more readily marketable in the discovery that your commitment is shared with the other fellow, who also knows and has read them. Then there is among books that type of investment for which men constantly seek when trying to place their money—the unlisted and almost unheard-of, lonely, isolated enterprise which one may, and probably will, have all to himself....

What follows is a series of what, in the money world, would be called “offerings.” These literary offerings are not necessarily in the least related to each other, although here and there you may find features in common. Each stands on the foundation of its own “attractiveness” to you as an individual; but there is none which has not given a good return to some group of readers, large or less large. Some are well-seasoned; others, although new, show their intrinsic worth for such time and attention as you may commit to them.

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J. C. Snaith, novelist. John Collis Snaith, born in 1876, in Nottinghamshire of Yorkshire stock. Athletic in his youth, before his health became impaired, playing cricket, football and hockey on county teams. Always in the middle of a novel, either at Skegness or in London, where he may with difficulty be tracked down at the Garrick Club, hidden among W. J. Locke, W. B. Maxwell, A. E. W. Mason, Hugh Walpole, Arnold Bennett, E. Temple Thurston, etc. His novels exhibit constant variety. Richard Mansfield was always hoping for a play from Snaith’s Broke of Covenden so that he might act as Broke. The Sailor, supposed to have been suggested by John Masefield’s career, was a great popular success (1916) and is read and remembered widely today. The Coming, an exquisite and powerful story in which the reappearance of Jesus Christ in present-day England is suggested, made an extraordinary impression. On the whole it is perhaps Snaith’s own favourite. The Undefeated, a story of England in wartime, had a large sale and gives promise of more permanence than any similar book, including H. G. Wells’s Mr. Britling. A recent novel, The Van Roon, is a lighter story written around the theft of a famous painting. Snaith’s Araminta, which is being freshly brought out this year, is a whimsical romance of a country girl who comes to London and is sued for by two noblemen. Snaith says: “Each novel I write is in the nature of an experiment. To me a good novel is a mental tonic, exhilarating, educative, humanising.” He is both versatile and in the quality of his work of unusual excellence.

W. B. Maxwell, novelist. English. A writer who has reached undeniable greatness at times and who, when possessing the finest material, need ask no odds of any living novelist. His most recent story, The Day’s Journey, is a beautifully-conceived and beautifully-written story of the friendship between two men enduring throughout their lives. The differences in character, the obstacles arising in the course of that friendship, the antagonisms and fallings-apart and the renewals of these two old comrades are put on paper with a fidelity of observation, a tenderness and an avoidance of sentimentality that would be difficult to overpraise. Maxwell’s novels are of great variety; attention is particularly called to In Cotton Wool, the story of a weakling. Mrs. Thompson, The Devil’s Garden and Spinster of This Parish are also highwater marks in his writing.

Hugh Walpole. Perhaps no living novelist has shown so uniform a quality or so progressive an excellence. He resembles a stock which, starting at a modest price and unfailingly paying dividends, has gone steadily upward to par and is now quoted at a premium. His great success, The Cathedral, is now followed by Jeremy and Hamlet, which, although not a “sequel,” is a companion volume to Jeremy (most popular of all Walpole’s stories before the appearance of The Cathedral). As Jeremy dealt with the history of a little boy—most singularly resembling the Hugh of Mr. Walpole’s own boyhood—so Jeremy and Hamlet presents the adventures of that boy accompanied by the only proper companion for a small boy, a dog.

Rudyard Kipling. For a discussion of Kipling’s new work, The Irish Guards in the Great War, see Chapter 8. The best exposition of Kipling, the poet, will be found in Andre Chevrillon’s Three Studies in English Literature: Kipling, Galsworthy, Shakespeare (translated by Florence Simmonds). Katharine Fullerton Gerould, in her Modes and Morals, in the essay on “The Remarkable Rightness of Rudyard Kipling,” offers a brilliant justification for Kipling as a prophetic and moral influence in English affairs. The literary investor should not let these aspects take his attention from the Kipling of Plain Tales from the Hills, of Kim and of such short stories as “The Brushwood Boy” and “They.” A collection of rich, remarkably diversified, “gilt-edged” securities possessing the widest possible market and an almost universal currency.

Selma Lagerlöf, Swedish novelist, the only woman so far to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The quality of her work is best conveyed by the words of various critics. Edwin Björkman: “She has revived not only the courage but the ability to feel and dream and aspire that belonged to the scorned romanticists of the early nineteenth century. But this ... she has achieved for us without surrender of that intimate connection between poetry and real life which was established by the naturalists in the latter half of the same century.” J. B. Kerfoot, in Life: “The wise cannot find bottom nor the child get beyond its depth.” Attempted comparisons with George Eliot fail because Selma Lagerlöf has the fine Swedish folklore to enrich the roots of her work. “She is as national,” says Walter Prichard Eaton, “as a song by Grieg or a play of Tchekov. And like all deeply national art, it is therefore universal.” Hugo Alfven, the Swedish composer: “Reading Selma Lagerlöf is like sitting in the dusk of a Spanish cathedral.... Afterward, one does not know whether what he has seen was dream or reality, but certainly he has been on holy ground.” The best approach is possibly through The Story of Gösta Berling. Her other great novels are Jerusalem, woven from the actual experience of Swedish colonists in the Holy Land, and The Emperor of Portugallia. Her Nils stories for children are mentioned in Chapter 9. Complete works are best procured in the Northland Edition.

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A convenient size and a beautiful binding are more than desiderata. Who, wishing Bram Stoker’s grim masterpiece, Dracula, would not now prefer a new copy in the handy leather of the Lambskin Library? If one is out to acquire a copy of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, will he not choose it in its plum-coloured leather and gilt top of the Murray Hill Library? If I go forth to buy Pride and Prejudice, I am as certain as anything to ask for it from the volumes of the Modern Student’s Library, because this will give me William Dean Howells’s introduction to the novel.

There is a further advantage of these collections in that they give ready and inexpensive access to exceptional books that are otherwise out of print. I might have excessive trouble, for example, to get hold of Dracula elsewhere. Yet the commonest advantage of such sets is probably as a guide in reading. A publisher does not put a book into his Lambskin Library, or his Murray Hill Library, or his Modern Student’s Library unless the book is one of proved worth and established permanence and continuing popularity. The Library, therefore, offers a convenient and trustworthy solution to those who, among books not freshly published, are unable to see the trees for the forest. A word about these collections is in order.

The Lambskin Library at present comprises nearly fifty volumes, chiefly fiction, although Lawrence F. Abbott’s Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt, Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life, Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery and Franklin’s Autobiography lay a massive foundation for biographies. Conrad, Frank Norris, Selma Lagerlöf, O. Henry, Dumas, Scott, Tarkington, Edna Ferber, Ellen Glasgow, Zola and Rider Haggard are some of the authors represented. Many of the books have interesting prefatory notes and among the contributors of these are William Lyon Phelps, Christopher Morley, William Allen White, John Macy and William Dean Howells.

The Modern Student’s Library is ultimately to include as many as possible of the books one would wish to read in a comprehensive survey of English and American literature. Both the general reader and the student have been held in mind; the books represent a sane departure from the heavily annotated texts of a few years ago. The books have been edited, and introductions to them have been provided by such authorities as William Dean Howells, Stuart P. Sherman, William Lyon Phelps and Carl Van Doren. Bacon’s Essays, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Browning, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, Emerson’s Essays, Hardy’s The Return of the Native, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Meredith, Ruskin, Scott, Stevenson, Thackeray, Thoreau and Whitman are among those already included.

The Murray Hill Library, commencing with modern fiction, will probably enlarge its scope to include some of the best modern non-fiction. Its very handsome binding now covers twelve books, picked works by Arnold Bennett, Somerset Maugham, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Irvin S. Cobb, Walpole, G. A. Birmingham, John Buchan, Stephen McKenna, Swinnerton and Richard Dehan.

Of an entirely different character but not less valuable are the very large volumes of the Nature Library—those volumes by Neltje Blanchan, Julia Ellen Rogers, Nina L. Marshall and others called (for the most part) The Butterfly Book, The Shell Book, The Tree Book, and so on. Fairly expensive books, these, but cheap at any price with their many and wonderful colour plates and photographs from life. In their outdoor field they are not to be surpassed.

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Books of a biographical character we have considered already (Chapter 8) but it ought to be emphasised that, for the investor in literature, they hold a position quite as enviable and altogether desirable as does the class of securities known as municipals for the investor of moneys. Time will not match for us a book like Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, nor will literature furnish us with a more strangely suggestive career than that related in Raymond Weaver’s Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic. It was C. Alphonso Smith’s O. Henry Biography that first gave the world the facts on which to base a true understanding of that extraordinary writer. The tale of unwearied courage in Edward Livingston Trudeau’s Autobiography cannot lose either its freshness nor its strength of inspiration. To read P. P. Howe’s Life of William Hazlitt and then to turn to his little book of selections called The Best of Hazlitt is to enter into a permanently valuable share of the English literary inheritance. The Letters of Henry James, selected and edited by Percy Lubbock, and James’s own Notes of a Son and Brother; Sir Sidney Colvin’s John Keats and his Memories and Notes of Persons and Places; the Letters of James Huneker and Huneker’s autobiography, Steeplejack; and the Letters and Papers of John Addington Symonds, edited by Horatio F. Brown, are all of the class of books whose content is a permanent acquisition, an actual “property” of which the reader, in legal language, becomes seized and possessed.

One’s investment in an ample author should be allowed to ramify in all directions natural to the lines of human interest. About Walt Whitman, for example, there is by now a cluster of books which the reader of Leaves of Grass or of Whitman’s prose cannot afford, in their entirety, to neglect. Whether he will want one or all, or what ones he will want, will depend upon the relation he establishes with Whitman himself. The best brief biography is Walt Whitman: The Man and His Work, translated from the French of Leon Bazalgette by Ellen FitzGerald. Personally I do not think one can feel himself acquainted with Whitman unless he has read, or read in, the three massive volumes of Horace Traubel’s With Walt Whitman in Camden. The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman, edited by Thomas B. Harned, form an unusual and engrossing chapter in the lives of both. Those keenly interested will explore further yet in the two volumes of the Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, edited by Emory Holloway, who is now at work on a long and comprehensive biography of the poet.

The book with beautiful illustrations is a true investment, since now such illustrations are seldom if ever wasted on a second-rate text. To a great extent these illustrated books are ones appreciable by children as well as by their elders—things like Westward Ho! and The Last of the Mohicans—and came up for our consideration in Chapter 9. But there are certain classics, like the editions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Milton’s Comus with pictures by Arthur Rackham, which are adult throughout. One of the most splendid is the Vierge Edition of Don Quixote, in four volumes, illustrated with 260 drawings by Daniel Vierge and provided with an introduction by Royal Cortissoz. The same work, illustrated by Jean de Bosschere, may be had in one large volume; and other treasures of the sort are The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, both illustrated by Edmund Dulac. I must not omit the edition of Scott’s Quentin Durward, with illustrations in color by the American artist, C. Bosseron Chambers.

When, in Chapter 2, we discussed books of essays, it was with the thought of their beguiling qualities pretty much forward in our minds. I hope I do not derogate the essay, a literary form raised to the highest eminence by Bacon, Emerson, Lamb and so many others, when I say that its widest and most useful office resembles the form of investment known as short-term notes. Investors of money are constantly in receipt of funds for which, at the moment, they have no suitable repository; and investors in literature are frequently in the same fix. The man with money buys high grade commercial paper with an early maturity and watches for his long-term investment. The reader with time on his hands may often most profitably do likewise. But in one respect he is the more favoured person. If his brief-lived investment is well-chosen, the chances are great that it will lead him to some author or some group of books to which he can gladly commit his reading hours for a month or several months or a year.

Such, among literary profit-producers, are books like Stuart P. Sherman’s The Genius of America and his Americans, the first devoted to “studies in behalf of the younger generation” of such subjects as Puritanism, shifting morals, popular education and American critical writing; the second a series of presentations of individual figures—Roosevelt, Emerson, Whitman, Carnegie, Paul Elmer More, Franklin, and others. Either his On or his fictional satire, The Mercy of Allah, should lead the chance reader some ways further in the conquest of Hilaire Belloc. Dr. Joseph Collins’s The Doctor Looks at Literature has, in a very few months, created and aborted some thousands of readers of James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoievski, Marcel Proust, D. H. Lawrence, May Sinclair, Rebecca West, Stella Benson, Katherine Mansfield and the other contemporary writers whose pathology it inquires into. Books about books have all the range from Jesse Lee Bennett’s invaluable reader’s Baedeker, What Books Can Do for Me (with priceless reading lists of every variety) to Maurice Francis Egan’s delightful Confessions of a Book-Lover and Henry van Dyke’s Companionable Books. What will you try? John Corbin’s The Return of the Middle Class with its impulsion toward other social studies? J. H. Gardiner’s The Bible as English Literature or William Lyon Phelps’s Human Nature in the Bible with their lights upon ancient thinking and racial character? Corbin’s book may lead you back to Edward Carpenter’s Civilization: Its Cause and Cure. Gardiner and Phelps may send you to Horace G. Hutchinson’s The Greatest Story in the World, which is the story of mankind from the beginnings of history to the time of the firm establishment of the Roman Empire. From that picturesque history of the civilisations that succeeded each other in the Mediterranean lands would you be led in the direction of Henry Fairfield Osborn’s Men of the Old Stone Age and Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, or toward the recent books by Lothrop Stoddard, or into the fascinations of Edwyn Bevan’s Hellenism and Christianity and G. Lowes Dickinson’s The Greek View of Life, I wonder? As one wishful of your enjoyment and satisfaction, I hope you wonder, too.

Here, of all things, is A History of Chinese Literature, by Herbert A. Giles, professor of Chinese in the University of Cambridge (you didn’t know they had one, did you?). It begins with Confucius (born B.C. 551) and is divided into eight parts according to dynasties. One sees easily that while each age had its poets and writers, the drama and the novel did not develop in China until the Mongol Dynasty (A.D. 1200) and the famous Ming Dynasty (A.D. 1368-1544). From all the important writers Dr. Giles quotes at length in excellent translation; he summarises plays and explains the curious technique of the Chinese theatre. The book is rounded off with examples of Chinese wit and humour.

Here is George H. McKnight’s English Words and Their Background, with facts only recently recognised about the relation and differences of American English and British English; with a good chapter on slang; with new light on the changes word meanings have undergone, and why; with stuff about personal names and place names.

The general reader has perhaps tried to find out about Dante, and found, on the one hand, some work by the scholar and for the scholar, on the other, books full of technical and controversial idiom. Behold, here is Mary Bradford Whiting’s Dante: The Man and the Poet with its simple and memorable account of the student, lover and statesman, the exile and wanderer, the poet and seer. Or he has wondered if it were impossible for anyone to write about sex with beauty and sanity—and then has had the miracle of getting hold of Havelock Ellis’s Little Essays of Love and Virtue wrought in his behalf. He has been the victim all his life of such stuff as Freudians are made on, and some benignant fate has put into his hands Basil King’s convincing account of The Conquest of Fear. He has wearied over the Younger Generation and been comforted as he read Brander Matthew’s The Tocsin of Revolt; contemporary criticism—too contemporary—has set his teeth on edge until he found a more ripened wisdom in the books of W. C. Brownell. A sense of futility and a dark brown taste of boredom have resulted from the perusal of the usual kind of book on How to Live; and the sparkling and nutritious antidote has proved to be Arnold Bennett’s How to Make the Best of Life. For that condition in which one cannot endure concentration on a single topic for the duration of a book—what? Perhaps either volume of Bennett’s Things That Have Interested Me, or some such book as Basil Anderton’s Sketches From a Library Window, in which one may read about a French gourmet, a sixteenth century humanist, holiday joys in Northumberland, the art of the translator, the adventures of an English seaman in the Napoleonic wars, or Sir Thomas Browne.

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“I never read fiction.”

The next time I meet him I shall not place in his hands a novel, not even one of the great masterpieces among the novels. I shall hand him My Best Story, to which thirty-one English authors have contributed (though we may claim John Russell for America). Here in a single book are such perfect tales as Stacy Aumonier’s “The Great Unimpressionable,” one from Ernest Bramah’s Kai Lung’s Golden Hours, Quiller-Couch’s “Statement of Gabriel Foot, Highwayman,” Galsworthy’s “Courage,” Perceval Gibbon’s “The Connoisseur,” Cunninghame Graham’s “The Lone Wolf,” Elinor Mordaunt’s “The Gold Fish,” John Russell’s “The Price of a Head” and Rebecca West’s “In a City That Is Now Ploughed Fields.” Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, W. W. Jacobs, May Sinclair, H. G. Wells and Israel Zangwill are some of the others who furnish stories for the collection. Such a book, by its variety as well as from its superlative quality, ought to win him to fiction more readily than any long tale, however distinguished.

He is rare, but you do sometimes meet him, that type of literary investor who cannot trust himself to range over the whole field ... like one whose fortune, however great, must needs be kept strictly in savings bank accounts. I grant you that one needs to know his fiction, both in itself and in relation to his possible profit. But I personally would not for the world be one of those who have never heard of Charles De Coster’s Legend of Ulenspiegel, that classic of the Lowland countries which Hendrik Van Loon named recently as one of the ten books he has enjoyed the most. I should not be willing to be ignorant of “Elizabeth,” whose Vera had such grim power and whose The Enchanted April made a good many enchanted Mays, Junes, Julys, Augusts and other months for its readers. Of what avail to have read novels by Kathleen Norris and to have missed Certain People of Importance, I should like to know? Who thinks he has any acquaintance with the work of Edna Ferber if he has omitted to read The Girls or such tales, in Gigolo, as “Old Man Minnick” and “Home Girl”? Yet there are unfortunate persons who read One Man in His Time and who will read the stories in The Shadowy Third and innocently suppose they have “read” Ellen Glasgow, that competent and admirable novelist whose earlier novels, like The Deliverance, have such surprising vitality when you read or re-read them today.

Opportunities lost? Ah, but one of the grand advantages of the literary investment over the money opportunity is right here: Your new and worthwhile book and your old and seasoned book are, alike, always offering.