PUBLISHER TO THE GENERAL
SIR,—Mr. Mark Goulden misunderstands me. I did not complain that his firm's production of General Patton's War As I Knew is was in- sufficiently lavish, but that it was ugly. Mr. Goulden says that "we went to the limit" with substance of paper, size of type, gold-blocking, and so on. I can well believe it. Far from suggesting that he should have gone further, "break the regulations, and also his obligations to his fellow-publishers," I would have had him observe the regulations even more austerely and emulate those publishers who turn out a dignified book printed in type of reasonable size, on paper less like blotting-paper, and with less black, red and gold about its spine. Mr. Goulden suggests that a literary critic is not qualified to discuss the format of a book (though I do know what "head-banding the spine" means ; I wonder if Mr. Goulden knows what- I mean by "index "). Indeed, he accuses me of petulance, lack of objectivity, .unfairness, un- kindness, jaundice and inaccuracy, when all I said was that the book was ugly and lacked an index. It is, and it does. I was too charitable to comment on the maps and the way they have been bound in ; I did not ask whether English readers would really prefer, thirty pages of appendices listing, inter alio, all the divisions that served under Patton, with their subordinate officers, to a brief index; I did not ask for limp leather and more gold leaf.
Mr. Goulden's answer to my brief comment is, -roughly, "Our book can't be ugly ; it cost 'a lot of money." (I have heard of film producers talking like that, but never before have I heard this answer from a publisher.) All right. Mr. Goulden says that he will shout hoo-Ray when he can spend more money still. Meanwhile r reserve the right to
insist that all that glitters is not Gdulden.—Yours, &c., Cvati, RAY: C.6, Albany, W. r.
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