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LITERARY DEPARTMENT

XXXVI

“TAKE ALONG A BOOK”

There seems to be a concerted effort, manifest in the “Take Along a Book” drive, to induce vacationists to slip at least one volume into the trunk before getting Daddy to jump on it.

This is a fine idea, for there is always a space between the end of the tennis-racquet and the box of soap in which the shoe-whitening is liable to tip over unless you jam a book in with it.  Any book will do.

It is usually a book that you have been meaning to read all Spring, one that you have got so used to lying about to people who have asked you if you have read it that you have almost kidded yourself into believing that you really have read it.  You picture yourself out in the hammock or down on the rocks, with a pillow under your head and pipe or a box of candy near at hand, just devouring page after page of it.  The only thing that worries you is what you will read when you have finished that.  “Oh, well,” you think, “there will probably be some books in the town library.  Maybe I can get Gibbon there.  This summer will be a good time to read Gibbon through.”

Your trunk doesn’t reach the cottage until four days after you arrive, owing to the ferry-pilots’ strike.  You don’t get it unpacked down as far as the layer in which the book is until you have been there a week.

Then the book is taken out and put on the table.  In transit it has tried to eat its way through a pair of tramping-boots, with the result that one corner and the first twenty pages have become dog-eared, but that won’t interfere with its being read.

Several other things do interfere, however.  The nice weather, for instance.  You start out from your room in the morning and somehow or other never get back to it except when you are in a hurry to get ready for meals or for bed.  You try to read in bed one night, but you can’t seem to fix your sun-burned shoulders in a comfortable position.

You take the book down to luncheon and leave it at the table.  And you don’t miss it for three days.  When you find it again it has large blisters on page 35 where some water was dropped on it.

Then Mrs. Beatty, who lives in Montclair in the winter time (no matter where you go for the summer, you always meet some people who live in Montclair in the winter), borrows the book, as she has heard so much about it.  Two weeks later she brings it back, and explains that Prince got hold of it one afternoon and chewed just a little of the back off, but says that she doesn’t think it will be noticed when the book is in the bookcase.

Back to the table in the bedroom it goes and is used to keep unanswered post-cards in.  It also is convenient as a backing for cards which you yourself are writing.  And the flyleaf makes an excellent place for a bridge-score if there isn’t any other paper handy.