Roy Temple House and "Books Abroad"

Abstract

Every so often in life, some man hits upon an idea and carries it out successfully. Of course! because the idea is so patently right and useful, so adapted to all the circumstances of the place and time, that given half chance it cannot but succee&d So it must have been with Books Abroad, which has been serving us so long and so admirably that one can hardly imagine our intellectual world without it. Yet what simple idea it was, at bottom! So simple that it took touch of genius to conceive it. Consider the staging of it. A vast, incoherent country, ours, its people plunging complacently deeper and deeper into the impenetrable forest of isolationism, both political and intellectual. A growing tendency for critics and writers to indulge in mutual backslapping, each assuring the other that we have the greatest, noblest, most original, most important ... (fill in dozen more superlatives, please !) literature in the world. The spirit of the solid citizen who told his young son, when the latter inquired as to the population of the world, What difference does it make? They're mostly foreigners, anyway!--Yet outside our borders, undismayed by our ignorance and conceit, steady flow of real Literature, much of it quite worthy of comparison with our own product, and some of it-dare I say it ?---even superior to our best.-Separating most of our citizens from any possibility of making the acquaintance of such foreign masterpieces in the original, an educational policy which declares itself satisfied with a foreign-language requirement of-what am I bid ? Thirteen years, as for English? Nine years, as in Europe? Four years, as of yesterday? Oh no! Two years will do it, or one and half, or perhaps one year of 15 units will look like something, even if it isn't! Obviously, the only sure way to make the American citizen even aware of all this wealth beyond our borders was to tell him about it in words that he had learned, however imperfectly, just by being alive and walking along with the crowd: in English, in short. And so Books Abroad was born, and grew, first in the brain of Roy Temple House, then in the editorial rooms of its