Television Critic

In Manhattan last week twelve people sat in a small office in the National Broadcasting Co. building and witnessed the first television book review in the U. S. The book was Sidney A. Spencer's The Greatest Show on Earth, a collection of photographs illustrating economic laws; the reviewer was baldish, bearded Critic Ernest Boyd. In a milky, translucent square of light in the television receiving apparatus, the audience could make out the figure of Critic Boyd, his features hidden in shadows, as he faced some indistinguishable framed object on the studio wall and began his review by exclaiming nervously, "Ah, Johann Gutenberg!" Intermittently photographs from the book were flashed on the screen: pictures of the unemployed, of banks, of labor-saving machinery. Some were clear, some blurred, a few merely smears and jagged lines. When Critic Boyd announced solemnly that the greatest show on earth properly began with man, television illustrated the observation with a mysterious shapeless blob of shadow that could not by any stretch of the imagination be called a representation of a human being. Observers nevertheless agreed that the review as a whole gave a strong impression of what the book was all about, an even stronger impression that it would be a long time before television book reviewing became a common practice.

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