Among the Literati

The threatened libel suit by Sidney Kingsley, author of “Men in White,” against Wolfe Kaufman, author of “Tender Cheeks,” because of the latter’s article in the American Spectator entitled “The Man Who Won the Pulitzer Prize,” will never become a reality. It was probably born in the mind of a Broadway columnist who saw a chance to cause trouble between two friends. Kingsley is much too clever to sue. The only party to benefit would be Covici, Friede, who happen to be the publishers of both young men involved….

Of the ten best-selling novels of 1934, not one was written by a Jew. Among non-fiction best sellers, Arthur Kallet and F. J. Schlink, with their “100,000,000 Guinea Pigs,” and Edmund Jacobson, with his “You Must Relax,” made the coveted ten…. During 1934, 106 more titles were published than in 1933, but the book business was much better. In fact, 1934 was the best year for booksellers since 1929. The enforcement of the code in which price maintenance is an integral part helped a great deal. It gave, as this column predicted last Spring, the small shops a chance to do some real business. Despite the assertions of large department stores, total sales did not decrease….

This column certainly has not pulled its punches in writing about the American Spectator, but it must admit that the current issue is one of the brightest that magazine has permitted to reach a newsstand. We call your attention to “Let Me Explain You Something,” by Jerome Weidman, the best Jewish story of the months; William Saroyan’s “My Picture in the Paper,’ ‘and “The Daisy Miller Case.”…

The New York Eevning Post as a circulation stunt is offering to its readers who clip enough coupons an encyclopedia in six volumes for about eighty-four cents per volume. It is stated that you can get that edition only by clipping the coupons. However, if you do not wish to clip, we tell you that you can procure the same “World Wide” illustrated encyclopedia in any bookshop in the country, in a two-volume edition for $5.98. Blue Ribbon are publishers.

UNCOMMON GOSSIP

Publishers are not always right. Knopf, after losing money on Bruno Frank, allowed him to go to Viking. The first book he wrote for that firm was chosen as a boko-club selection. It was a biography of Cervantes. Robert Nathan caused Bobbs-Merrill a headache for many years, but as soon as Knopf took him and his “One More Spring,” he jumped into the best-seller class. Simon and Schuster exploited Werfel through many seasons but with no success. His first book for Viking “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,” is leading the fiction lists. Doubleday Doran bought Sinclair Lewis from Harcourt Brace, but the red-topped one has not come near his previous sales. As Major Bowes in his Amateur Night radio program says, “round and round it goes, but where it ends, nobody knows.”