READING FOR THE TROOPS
SIR,—There is a very large number of cultivated men now in the Forces who are able to carry with them only a minimum of books. Could you, Sir, use your influence to persuade a publisher, or a group of publishers to co-operate in producing a volume, allowing for the least possible profit, with moderately long selections from English prose, drama and epic and narrative verse, and some lyrics. I put forward as suggestions for inclusion: a passage from a modernised version of Beowulf, the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, one of Shakespeare's plays, some of his sonnets, one of Ben Jonson's plays, some selections from the metaphysical poets, Dryden, Milton, and Pope, some Pepys, some Boswell, some Fielding, one or two essays of Elia, Psalms and Gospel passages, and I Corinthians 13 from the Authorised Version of the Bible, some Scott, and Jane Austen, Dickens and Thackeray, some Shaw, Galsworthy and " Q " (not forgetting Wordsworth, Tennyson and Hardy).—Yours faithfully, G. S. Foss.
Officers' Mess, Carnegie Hall, No. rz Depot, T.E., R.A.M.C., Beckett Park, Leeds, 6.
[The case might be well met by a reprint of the admirable " broadsheets," on precisely the lines here suggested, issued by The Times in the last war.—En., The Spectator.]
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