One of the most pleasant recollections I have of my recent trip to Europe is the number and variety of good books which were everywhere in evidence. What a relief it was to be looking again at paper-backed books whose titles, authors', and publishers' names alone combine to make such attractive, seductive cover designs. Is there anything more dull, monotonous, and destructive to the appetite than the typical American hard-cover book whose paper jacket screams and shrieks to capture attention? Facing me, as I write, are the backs of some thousand or more books which form my meager library. The foreign editions stand out with the same downright integrity, simplicity, and reality which distinguish the man of Europe from the American in my eyes. For, in the realm of book-making as in the realm of politics or any other realm, each nation reveals its own peculiar traits. Opening a Swedish book, for example, you will always find excellent white paper and clean, clear, attractive type enhanced by the diacritical marks employed in Swedish script. One can never mistake an Italian book for a German book, or vice versa. As for editions, the foreign ones are as superior to the American variety as anything de luxe can be. It is the same sort of difference one finds between the best American cooking and the best French, or between a suite of rooms at the Claridge or the Crillon and a suite in any expensive hotel in Manhattan (where there seem to be nothing but expensive hotels). Every time I receive a copy of the Guilde du Livre's monthly bulletin my heart jumps with joy. Even if I have not the time to read every article, the mere leafing through the bulletin warms me and exhilarates me in a way that nothing from the American publishing world possibly can. I could offer many reasons for my reactions but the chief one, I believe, is that anything which a European writes about books or authors revives in me that most wonderful feeling of inexhaustibility. With us the subject of literature seems to have been worn threadbare ages ago. I have the impression that there is no genuine, vital, continuous interest in books or their makers. All I am aware of is a compensatory activity which resembles the feverishness of drunken grave-diggers. The few who spend their time fanning the flame, who work laboriously to dig up new facts, figures, or whatever may have a sensational appeal, do not impress me as book-lovers; they do not write from a superabundant wealth of experience or association with books; they are not overflowing with rich memories, bizarre encounters, shattering firsthand discoveries; they are not making symphonic parallels and analogies with other books, other authors, other languages, other times. One seldom feels that any of these gents has ever been on intimate terms with a great author, or even a distinguished author. This does not deter him, however, from writing about his subject as if he were an all-seeing eye. In my prejudiced opinion this kind of writing reeks of embalming fluid, or, worse, of the garbage can. The most sickening stench exhales from the accredited scholars, the erudite termites who hollow their way through books until there is nothing left but the shreds of literature and the husks of what once were men. No matter where I went on the Continent, no matter how small the town, I was forever planting myself before a bookshop window, scanning the titles of new and old publications with feverish interest. In America I have only to glance at a window out of the corner of my eye and I am certain that there is nothing on the shelves of that shop which can possibly make appeal to me. It is as if all the books, all the magazines, everything printable (including the dictionaries and encyclopedias) were written by the same standardized mind, written by some incredible monster of unilateral taste and sclerotic imagination whose name might well be John Doe or Aloysius Smith. No matter what the subject matter-science, fiction, biography, philosophy-all seems to merge into a hazy, vacuous glue of words which falls apart merely by looking at it. …