CRIMSON BOOKSHELF

We learn from the Century Company that "The Gentleman in Pajamas," a novel by Charles Neville Buck, to be published by them this month, has for plot the following situation: A burglar, instead of gathering up availables and leaving the scene of his crime at the earliest convenient moment, settles down to live with his victim while he forces him to liquidate his estate and turn over his assets as fast as they become easily negotiable to the man who greeted him one midnight with: "All I want is all you have." The burglar meets servants, secretary, friends of his victim, and the police, without disaster to himself, we are told. It must take considerable ingenuity to make this plausible, but we are assured that the novel crook is not at all improbable within the limits of the story. Certainly no one wants him probable outside it.

"Even the Archbishop of Canterbury comprises 59 per cent of water,"--a statement of fact which gives an idea of the humorous touch and the lively style that make the reading of Sir Arthur Shipley's new elementary biology a stimulating exercise. He calls his little book "Life," prefaces his chapters with apt quotations from the poets, and explains with an unusual combination of scientific accuracy and literary flavor all about protoplasm, cells, feeding, the soil and the sap, food, digestion, respiration, movement, and reproduction, in plants and animals.

Percy Marks, author of "The Plastic Age," the college novel which had a second printing in the first week of its life, and has had a third since, seems to have caused considerable talk in the colleges themselves, and he begs, through his publishers, The Century Co., to state once more, and most emphatically, that his imagined college of "Sanford" does not represent any one college. He also declares that every major incident recorded there he himself has seen, or heard of from most immediate and unquestionable witnesses.

His own college experiences., his publishers add, have been at the University of California, his alma mater; Harvard, from which he took an A.M., degree; Brown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Labor Union College, Dartmouth, and again Brown, where he is now an instructor in English.