The Coolidge examiner., 1937-04-29

AAONAA
back to Boston each season and
swarm out to the historic towns
about it. They want to see the old
places where their ancestors lived
and spots famous in the annals of
early days: Bunker Hill monument;
Faneuil hall; the site of the Boston
Tea Party; Old North church; Paul
Revere's house; the tomb of Mother
Goose; the site of the Boston Mas
sacre; the sacred Goldfish in the
Statehouse; and nearby Plymouth
Rock, Concord, and Lexington, and
the Witch House at Salem.
Today Boston prints more books
than when she was pre-eminently a
literary center" Manuscripts pour
in to her editors. Novels, carloads
of dictionaries, and schoolbooks in
Spanish and English, Sanskrit and
Eskimo, are shipped from here, Of
ten to markets as remote as Bagh-
dad.
Her Golden Age of letters, when
Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow,
Whittier, Holmes and Lowell used
to frequent the Old Corner Book
Store, passed with the rise Of New
York as market for manuscripts.
But curious visitors still seek out
Emerson's old home at Concord;
they proWl through the country
house of Louisa M. Alcott-admis-
sion 25 cents-and drop a tear for
Little Women" For another 25
cents they see the House of Seven
Gables" at Salem.
In American letters Dana's 1.-TWO
Years Before the Mast" Melville's
"Moby Dick" or ''Typee," and the
brilliant historical work ot Prescott,
Parkman, Fiske, and Bancroft must
long endure, as will other names,
from Edward Everett Hale, author
of THE Man Without a Country"
and Julia Ward Howe, who wrote
The Battle Hymn of the Republic"
to Thoreau and John Boyle O'Reilly.
From Boston still come important
magazines for both adults and
youths. But it is the StupendouS
output of textbooks which aStonisheS.
You can imagine the volume when
you stop to think that between Is
and 80 million American children
alone are enrolled in schools; that
they must have some 100000
books when schools open each Sep
tember, and that Boston is one of
the chief textbook-producing cen
ters in the world.
World Center for Textbooks.
There are many schoolbooks,
said an official of a publishing COM
pany, whose sales make that of
a popular novel look diminutive.
They are handled not in dozens of
boxes, but in carloads of 10000
pounds each.
''While some of our novels, Uncle
Toms Cabin and 'Rebecca of Sun
nybrook Farm, for example, have
sold more than half a million each,
our little school pamphlets such
as 'Evangeline' and The Courtship
of Miles Standish' have sold at the
rate of a million a year.
1.-The task of getting sufficient
schoolbooks ready to meet the sud-
den demand every September, when
orders come in at the last minute by
wire, means that publishers usually
begin printing these books as long
as ten months ahead"
Books made in Boston are sent
everywhere that English is used in
Schools" said another publisher.
More than that; in translation, they
go to scores of foreign lands. Re-
Gently orders came from Baghdad
for thousands of our Craig's Path
ways in Science Arabic transla-
tions of Breasted's Ancient Times
and a number of our other books
are used in the schools of Iraq. Not
long ago we granted the govern
ment of Iraq permission to translate
Caldwell and Curtis Introduction to
Science into Arabic.
"You know that the British Isles
are citadel of the classics. We
feel gratified, therefore, that our
series, Latin for Today is now in
wide use in Scotland and England.
These volumes are the authorized
books in New Zealand and at least
one of the states of Australia, be-
sides being much used in South AT
rica.
Latin America is today using
carloads of Boston textbooks. They
are Spanish readers, biographies,
arithmetics, hygiene books, al
gebras, geometries, and others.
"In Ottawa I saw a wall map
with tiny flags that marked the
sites of Indian schools; many were
up within the Arctic Circle. All these
schools use our books. This summer
we had to hurry one new book
through for publication early in Au-
gust so we might get it to these
schools before ice closed naviga-
ton to the Far North"