The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1903-03-14
BOOK NOTES.
Various items About Books Which
are Attracting Attention.

CL4OuS 4tSLlS ADOuJ DOCKS w AlCA
Are Attracting Attention.
The third issue of the Boakiovers'
Magazine is even an Improvement on
the two previous numbers and this in
face of the fact that its plant in Phila-
delphia was destroyed by fire while The
plates were on the press. Such enter
prise deserves encourag cement
Herbert S. Houston, a former Kansan.
who organized the. advertising depart
ment for Doubleday. Page & Co.'S two
successful magazines, The Worlds
Work and Country Life in America, has
become a member of that thriving firm.
Mr.. Houston has been well known in
publishing and advertising circles for
some years.
With its March number Country Life
in America amhitiously undertakes to
help one through the mysteries of all
kinds of gardening the year round. This
is the second double number of this
beautiful magazine dealing with spec
ial subject, the superb Christmas An
nual of Winter Sports being the first A
veler's Calendar" which is to tell each
month of the places most attractive to
the cOuntry-loVer, and information for
reaching these places will be furnished
by new ana well worked out plan.
When Harper's Magazine is being
printed, the women who are employed
to sort or gather together the different
sections of one copy of the periodical
handle 100000 of these sections in one
day. This gives some idea or the work
involved in getting out one edition of
popular magazine. A statistician in the
Harper factory has also computed that
each of these women While gathering
together the separate sections of the
Magazine preparatory to binding, walks
from five to seven miles day. The
women are incredibly swift of move
ment, their hands Whirring back and
forth like humming birds, and in col
lecting the separate sections from the
great white piles of printed sheets the
eye can scarcely follow their rapid mo-
ton In cases of extra editions like
that of Christmas, the above figures are
largely increased.
Is truth stranger than fiction2 Zola
seems to find it so. and so does Edward
W. Townsend. the author of Lees and
Leaven." the new novel of New York
life which Mcclure, Phillips & Co. have
just brought out Mr.. Townsend and
his critics have split upon the reality
of events in certain chapters of his
book, especially in the chapter "A Mans
Face in the Dark" which pictures very
wildly a policemans brutal treatment
of .tsea-fOod man" from whose basket
the arm of the law has hlched a boiled
lobster. The critics claim that Mr..
TOwnsend's scene is too brutal to be
true, and thereby hangs a tale to Emil
Zola's comment on certain phases of
New York life. When Mr.. Townsend
was q newspaper man. one of the big
gest pieces of reporting he did was the
famous Lexow committees investigation
of municipal corruption in New York.
His daily reports Of these proceedings
were sent by a justice of the supreme
court of New York to Emil Zola. who
was a friend and correspondent of the
justice. Commenting on Mr. Town
sends account of two instances of po-
lice burtality which were especially helm
GUS lola wrote:
These being facts your novelists win
not have to engage their powers of in
vention for the exhibition of human
( brutality. the like of which I have been
+ condemned for daring to imagine"
/ The instances spoken of by lola were
! incorporated in the book, and the point
of the story IS that they are just the
/ ones to which the critics take exception.