What's doing? How often the question is asked, but seldom with regard to the book world because we become sadly accustomed to having our literary news dribble through to us after the rest of the world has read the books or passed judgment on the plays. Shanghai is very fortunate for once in a way by having an advance courier who has come out from New York fresh from visits to all the leading publishers, full of the news concerning authors, and bringing advance copies of the new autumn and winter books—or if not these then their "dummies" and sample jackets.
There is certainly a great satisfaction in knowing what is to happen a little in advance of the world at large, and after visiting the book display which' Mr. Henry M. Snyder, publishers' representative, has brought out to Shanghai and has had on exhibition in the Palace Hotel-for some weeks, one has the happy sensation of having attended the latest meetings of the Authors' Club, interviewed the publishers in their privetest of offices and talked with people who are thoroughly en rapport with the world of books and discuss new editions instead of new gowns and. mystery plots instead of sandwich fillings.
It is hard to know where to begin to broadcast the interesting things Mr. Snyder had to tell but since youth must be served, let us begin with the children's books. "Boys and Girls of Bookland," a collection of briefly told stories- of child characters in famous stories, by Nora Archibald Smith, with 11 illustrations in colour by Jessie Wilcox Smith, published by the Cosmopolitan Ca., will be on sale by Shanghai book: sellers this autumn. (And may we here parenthetically remark, with apologies for our previous omission "that Mr. Snyder does not book orders from one firm alone, but"just as he re-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.