Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3817/Literary Gossip
The Autumn publishing season will undoubtedly be affected by the war, several firms having decided to withhold most of their forthcoming books. Messrs. Odder and Thynne, however, being convinced that the reading public cannot subsist entirely on newspapers, have with great public spirit resolved to publish their full programme, which is unusually full of works of interest.
The foremost place in their list is allotted to Principal Toshley Potts's volume of essays, which bear the attractive title of The Hill of Havering. Principal Potts was recently hailed by Sir Nicholson Roberts as "the Scots A. C. Benson," and this felicitous analogy will, we feel sure, be triumphantly vindicated by the contents of this epoch-making work, which by the way is dedicated to Dr. Emery Cawker, of the University of Brashville, Ga.
Another work of outstanding significance is a volume of poems, entitled Kailyard Carols, from the accomplished pen of Mr. Alan Bodgers, whom Mr. David Lyall, in a three-column article in the Penman, recently declared to be the finest lyric poet since Shelley, and Mr. Lyall seldom makes a mistake. Mr. Bodgers, it may be added, is the sub-editor of the Kilspindie Courant, and has a handicap of twenty-two at the local golf club.
Very welcome also is the announcement that Professor Hector McGollop has undertaken to edit a series of Manuals of Moral Uplift, to which he will contribute the opening volume on The Art of Unction. Other contributors to the series are Dr. Talisker Dinwiddie, Principal Marcus Tonks and the Rev. Bandley Chadd.
In the department of fiction the most remarkable of the novelties promised by Messrs. Odder and Thynne is The Nut's Progress, by Mr. Ewan Straw. It will be remembered that in a four-column review of Mr. Straw's last book, Nothing Doing, which appeared in the Xmas number of the Book Booster, Sir Clement Shorthouse declared that this talented fictionist combined the lilt of Frank Smedley (the author of Frank Fairleigh) with the whimsicality of Barrie and the austere morality of Annie Swan. Otherwise we may be sure the firm of Odder and Thynne would never have published a work with so risky a title.