Yarn Fever

THE HIGH ADVENTURE--Jeffery Farnol--Little, Brown ($2). "We are out upon the high adventure, you and I; battle, murder and sudden death, Bill; blood, fire and stricken field are all one to us. Show me your teeth--excellent! Look at these fists--sufficient, I venture to think. . . . Come!" Thus Jeremy Veryan to his dog as he sets out across Mr. Farnol's newest pages to escape a crabbed guardian, find his father's murderer and woo a real storybook heroine in that most romantic of epochs, the day of The Broad Highway. Nothing further is necessary to introduce this book to the thousands and thousands that will read it.

John Jeffery Farnol used to sit scrouged up in his nightshirt outside the parlor door while his father read stories to his mother. This was in Kent in the '80s. At school he used to tell stories to his mates that would last weeks, months, terms. There was no money to send him to college and his father tried to cure the boy's fever for yarning. But even in a Birmingham brassworks he jotted notes and spun tales at lunch hour. It lost him his job, but the fights he fought made red blood for his heroes and villains. Once he had to climb up through a 120-foot chimney on a bet and fight a man when he came down groggy with soot and exertion. Penniless at 21, he married an American girl (Blanche Hawley), came to the U. S., painted scenery in the Astor Theatre. In 1906-07, three Manhattan publishers turned down The Broad Highway, most of which was written in a dismal, rat-run studio on Tenth Ave. He nearly burned it. Over 600,000 copies have been sold since an English firm took it in 1908. Beltane the Smith, The Amateur Gentleman and a dozen others are known wherever stories are read. Chunky, genial, teeming with tales, Jeffery Farnol is the modern Dumas-Dickens.