WITHIN THE SPHERE OF LETTERS.--GLANCE AT
                BOOKS AND MAGAZINES-THEIR
                   MESSAGES AND MAKERS.

   Mr. Geo. W. Forbes, A.M., Librarian West End Branch
                  Boston Public Library.

          OF making many books there is no "end," wrote the great
          Hebrew preacher quite three thousand years ago, and
          yet Solomon lived not in the age of printing, nor in
          twentieth-century America.      It is  doubtful  whether
          throughout the history of Judea there were as many
          books as were published in the English-speaking world
          last year, or whether all antiquity's boast  in the line
          of volumes was  anything  like a twelve-month output
          in the wizardry of modern  book-making. More than
          25,000 volumes were thrown off from the presses in
the English-speaking realms alone in 1911, and the fore-sheets from the
numerous publishing houses indicate an even larger output for the
present year.  Besides these there are the myriad monthly, weekly and
daily publications which, keeping pace each morn, with the celestial light
and cheer irradiate the mental world with beneficent rays, and which, like
the Patmean host, no man can number.

                         ----------------

        The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and the
                          Promise Land.

   Two books, "The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man," $1.30,
Boston, Sherman, French and Company, and "The Promise Land," by
Mary Antin, Boston, Houghton, Mifflin Co., have been causing some lit-
tle stir in the literary world during the ebbing summer days of this
rapidly passing year. Each of these books attracts the attention of the
reading public by a merit distinctly its own. Both are in fact autobio-
graphies taken up wholly with the personal experiences of the writers who
each tells his story in his oyn way and form entirely different points of
view.
195




			

African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, Vol. 29, Num. 2

Within the Sphere of Letters-Glance at Books and Magazines-Their Messages and Makers

Volume:  29
Issue Number:  02
Page Number:  195
Date:  10/1912