Rensselaer Republican, Volume 28, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 September 1895 — LITERARY LITTLEBITS [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

LITERARY LITTLEBITS

“John Oliver Hobbs” (Mrs. Craigie) has been elected president of the Society of Women Journalists of London. This is since her divorce. Inasmuch as the English journalist George Augustus Sala, recently testi- | fled in court that his time was worth to ; him $25 an hour, and that he had more t demands upon it than he could possibly meet, it is somewhat astonishing (says the New' York Tribune) to find him j selling his library by auction and a©- | ceptlng from the crown a pension of $lO a week' from a fund which is usualJ ly restricted to providing pensions for i poverty-stricken widows and orphans ! of literary life. t The Atheneum records the death of Richard Herne Shepherd, an eccentric ; man of letters, very familiar to London booksellers of ten years ago. “To all collectors of first editions, the name of Richard Herne Shepherd,** says a writer In the Atheneum, “is a household word. He may be said to have invented that class of bibliography H» was, perhaps, the last man who regarded a business letter ag a literary composition, and his briefest note wa# turned out as if it were a contribution to the Atheneum.” When S. R. Crockett was a boy on a farm in Little Duchrae, In "Scotland, he spoke the Scotch dialect that Burns ha* immortalized-even the exact words of the poet, according to Mr. Crockett’s statement. He has been an author for nine years, and now, at 84, famous on two continents, he is in physical appearanee'a veritable giant, broad-shoul-dered, and six feet four inches in height. It is cheerful to hear Mr. Crockett’s asservation, mado to an interviewer, that the Scotch are not thrifty as a race,. but, on the contrary, very extravagant. One is reminded of the Scot’s complaint, against London as an expensive place: that he had not been there more than twenty-four hours when “bang went | saxpeuce.” William Helnemann, the London publisher, was born In England, but commenced at an early age to lead a cosmopolitan sort of existence. He went abroad and picked up three languages. Ttten he went to Trubner’s and learned his trade. When Trubner joined partnership with Kegan Paul, he started publishing on his own account, on Jan. 1, 1889. On Fgb. 1 he published his first book—Hall Caine’s “The Bondman.” It ran through many editions, and was a worthy forerunner of “TheManxman.” Since then among lib successes have been “The Heavenly Twins,” “The Scapegoat,” “Ideals,’* “The Green Carnation,” “Children of the Ghetto,” “The Naulahka," “Wreckage” and “The Master”