BOOK RETURNS C.S. Lewis once suggested that every age has its advantages and disadvantages. His own youth suffered from the decline of civility, virtue, faith, and humanity. On the other hand, books were cheap. We can’t say the same. I shudder every time I type into a review the fact that some university press wants $70 for a study of natural law. I’m a fan of Martin Cruz Smith, but is his new mystery “December 6” something I would actually buy at $26 in hardback? We would see fewer of those reviews that say “a worthy volume” or “an enjoyable read” if reviewers had to shell out $37.50 of their own money for a copy of the book they so blithely praise. Still, we do have one advantage in these sad days: We are living in a golden age of reprints–expensive reprints, you understand, but good ones. Despite the Sonny Bono amendment’s attempt to add another 20 years to copyrights, every season’s new-book catalogues bring notice of a dozen forgotten classics’ coming back into print. The Oxford World’s Classics series, for instance, has just added Matthew Lewis’s 1795 “The Monk,” the greatest, grossest, most gothic Gothic novel ever written, with an introduction by Stephen King, of all the oddly appropriate people. The New York Review of Books has started a reprint house, and volumes such as M.I. Finley’s 1954 “The World of Odysseus” almost reconcile one to, well, the New York Review of Books. The dearth of good children’s books has prompted two publishers to reissue G.A. Henty’s adventure books. Overlook is printing in gorgeous volumes Walter R. Brooks’s Freddy the Pig tales. Last year, Michael Dirda praised in these pages Prion’s republication of Bashford’s Edwardian satire “Augustus Carp, Esq. By Himself, Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man.” Last month, Thomas M. DeFrank added an essay on Broadman and Holman’s reissuing of the Chip Hilton sports stories. AND THEN there’s a new reprint house in New York called Green Mansion, started by Madelene Towne, a book-loving lawyer whose inability to find copies of her favorites led her into publishing. A box with the first season’s offerings arrived in the mail this week, and it’s an astonishingly good selection. The first volume I pulled out was Patrick Dennis’s “The Joyous Season,” the funniest Christmas book ever written, by the author of “Auntie Mame” and “Little Me,” the hilarious parody of actresses’ memoirs (also reissued this fall, by Broadway Books, and somebody needs to use the occasion to resurrect Patrick Dennis’s reputation). The second Green Mansion volume I pulled out was Nora Johnson’s 1958 girls’ story “The World of Henry Orient.” One of my wife’s favorite children’s books, “Adopted Jane” by Helen F. Daringer, followed. Later finds included Marchette Chute’s young reader’s tale “The Wonderful Winter,” about a boy who runs off to join Shakespeare’s theater company, and B.J. Chute’s 1956 adult parable “Greenwillow,” nearly forgotten after its adaptation as a Broadway musical in 1960. (Wasn’t there a third Chute sister who wrote as well? I have a vague memory that there was, but I can’t dig up her name.) The result of the box from Green Mansion was that I didn’t write that exciting piece I was supposed to do on voter fraud in South Dakota, but stayed up far too late reading “The World of Henry Orient.” I knew the 1964 movie version, a sweet account of a pair of schoolgirls in New York, starring Peter Sellers as the wild-living classical pianist on whom the girls form a crush (reputedly based on Oscar Levant). But I had never read the book, and it is much deeper and darker than the movie. Where the movie ends sweet, the book ends sad, with the loss of promise, innocence, and energy in the brilliant Valerie Boyd and her friend, the narrating Marian Gilbert. Is this right? Not having ever been a thirteen-year-old girl, I hesitate to deny that women feel the loss of something golden and alive in the change from child to adult. But I had always thought this mostly a literary construction of women’s fiction or a derivative feature of that 1950s era in which all adulthood felt like loss (witness, for example, “The Catcher in the Rye”). And yet, there’s something undeniable and real about Val and Marian. The poignancy and insight of Nora Johnson’s “The World of Henry Orient” makes me realize I will never understand the inner life of girls. –J. Bottum
