Book to End Books

A NEW DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS ON HISTORICAL PRINCIPLES FROM ANCIENT AND MODERN SOURCES --Selected & Edited by H. L Mencken --Knopf ($7.50).

The result of Editor Mencken's 25 years of "literary scavenging," this is one of the rare books that deserve the well-worn greeting "Here at last." No greater nor more useful than Bartlett's Familiar Quotations or Burton Stevenson's Home Book of Quotations, its 1,347 close-printed, double-columned pages are nevertheless packed with entertainment, edification and some valuable innovations. The quotations are dated, whenever possible, back to the first man who uttered them. They are arranged not under their authors but "under many more rubrics than any other such work can show." With careful or mischievous exceptions, "all mere platitudes" are omitted. The book is notably rich in proverbs and Biblical quotations.

The reader may thus trace from start to semi-finish a concentrated history of thumbnail memoranda on such subjects as God, boredom, marriage, work, Government, lawyers, shoals of others. He may learn the Golden Rule not only from the New Testament but from Confucius, Isocrates, Tobit, the Mahabharata, Hillel Ha-Babli; such shy self-revelations as the U.S. proverb: "Do others or they will do you," or Bernard Shaw's "Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same." The reader can observe that, whereas there is much respectful talk about law itself, human experience with lawyers has been bilious. He can get every sort of opinion of work, from Hippocrates' sound advice "Never work when hungry" to the African proverb: "Work only tires a woman, but it ruins a man."

He may be surprised to learn--and to corroborate in Bartlett --that the National Anthem reads not "in triumph shall wave" but "Oh, long may it wave." He will discover, if he did not know it, that "Spare the rod and spoil the child" is not from the Bible but is a folk improvement on it dating from about A.D. 1,000. He will be glad to see that Editor Mencken enshrines his file-tongued old friend James Huneker ("He died without owing me a cent"); that he respects the gentle excellence of the late Justice Brandeis' dissenting opinions; that he is not afraid to rescue Elbert Hubbard from the Roycrofters (with, for instance, his definition of God as "The John Doe of philosophy and religion"). He will encounter such sharp or strange anonymities as the Polish proverb "God can shave without soap" or this definition of a suffragette (circa 1906): "One who has ceased to be a lady and not yet be come a gentleman." Of course there are omissions. Francis I's gallant "All is lost save honor" is quoted--and corrected--but Jim Fisk's complacent revision of it, substituting "nothing" for "all," does not appear. Kipling's "A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke" is in its proper place (under Cigar, not Woman) but e. e. cummings' acerb switch ("For a bad cigar is a woman but a gland is only a gland") might well have been cited, too. Under the opinions about "men of mark" Mencken fails to mention Mark Twain's famous "Just that one omission alone[Jane Austen's books] would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it." Lincoln's "I laugh because I must not cry--that's all, that's all" is overlooked; so are such famed phrases as "Damned clever, these Chinese" and "Elementary, my dear Watson"; so are such slogans as "Next to myself I like BVD best" and "War to end war," which are deeply impacted in U.S. folk speech. Also omitted, most inconveniently, is an index of authors.

So, modestly, are any attributed phrases by one of the liveliest of living coiners, Henry Louis Mencken. "I thought it would be unseemly to quote myself. I leave that to the intelligence of posterity."

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