YOUTH'S COMPANION ANTHOLOGY

The anthology of St. Nicholasproved that nostalgia is a powerful incentive to reader interest. This Youth's Companion Anthology makes a direct appeal to a similar market, the grand-parents, the great-grand-parents of today's youth, yes, even some of the parents who may have rejoiced in bound volumes on nursery shelves. For The Youth's Companion, as I knew it, marked a red letter day as each week rolled round, and here and there, among the selections Lovell Thompson has included, were many still unfaded in memory. There were great names, as we view them now, and equally good stories by lesser lights. Mary Roberts Rinehart, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Ernest Thompson Seton, Stephen Crane, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Edith Wharton, Bret Harte, and many many more would mark milestones on any magazine's roster. Verse too comes from such a far range as James Whitcomb Riley and Robinson Jeffers, while Emily Dickinson made numerous contributions, and Robert Frost found early acceptance. The years of its life- 1827-1927- provided through its pages the portrait of the century it recorded, in literary output, to be sure, but also in mirroring changing patterns of life, changing codes of manners, changing standards of morals. The notes on the material, not only those introducing each of the four sections, but the connecting links between inclusions, capture those significances, point out the foretaste of fashions to come, look backward or forward as the case might be. The ""difference in outlook is the measure of the events between"", he comments, but it is more than that. It is America, through its century of growing pains; at the start- 1827- the total population closely paralleled what New York City boasts today. And in those years the frontiers were breached. The early years, in the contributions included, afford more food for curiosity, but the subsequent sections (Lovell Thompson reverses the chronology, wisely, I think) provide an extraordinarily high average of good reader interest for youth today, as well as reminiscent enjoyment for their elders.