The Weekly Reviews

John Farrar Compliments Them All

Literary reviews crowd the horizon. One sun sets as another rises. What of the three chief holders of the present sky: Books (issued as a Sunday supplement by The New York Herald Tribune), The Saturday Review (TIME'S own) and The Literary Review (issued as a Saturday supplement by The New York Evening Post) ? I read all three and consider it a necessary part of my education. All three have their merits.

The Literary Review of Editor W. Orton Tewson follows somewhat in the footsteps of Arthur Maurice's old supplement on The Sun. Edited to reach a large number of people and to interest them in books, it is a journalistic performance of merit, and I find it always interesting. It publishes many illustrations in black and white, some of which are good and some of which are not. Its chief merit is that it is seldom dull--and I can think of. few better recommendations for a magazine of this sort. The Saturday Review is as authoritative as all followers of Editor Canby knew it would be. Its editorials are clear, its reviewers carefully chosen. Its essays, if somewhat academic, have a certain charm. Mr. Morley's "The Bowling Green"and Mr. William Benet's "The Phoenix Nest" recommend it heartily to the large personal followings of these gentlemen. It is not in any sense a supplement to a paper. It is a review in the traditions of the English reviews, with somewhat of the complexion of The Times Literary Supplement; or rather, perhaps, with more of the manner of a political weekly without the politics.

Editors Stuart Pratt Sherman and Irita Van Doren of Books have been able to combine dignity with readability to an unusual degree. The choice between The Saturday Review and Books is difficult to make. It will depend, largely, on your feeling for Messrs. Canby and Sherman; on which you prefer as a critic and writer of stimulating editorials--for both write editorials and both are stimulating. Miss Anne Carroll Moore's survey of children's literature in Books is unusual and Isabel Patterson does the gossip, taking her place with Burton Rascoe, with Morley, with Benet, with the anonymous and changing Kenelm Digby. Whether or not these supplements survive, it is interesting and important that the public apparently wants them and wants, too, in large quantities the Book Review section of The New York Times, which, as a purveyor of book news, has never been excelled and is the most lavishly and, I think, tastefully illustrated of all. It has, in a way, less personality, but it is good. So are they all. What does it mean? That we are reading more books than before and reading them more intelligently ?

J. F.