retail trade. It enables the book buyer to discard his purchasing mistakes without financial regret, to preserve worthy books in bindings of his own choice, and at no great expense to give to his library the richness lent by tooled leather.

And sixty francs is no low price for an Englishman or an American. It is fifteen shillings in England and over three dollars in America. In either country it will buy a book well bound and painstakingly printed. Shakespeare and Company's "Ulysses" is neither. Like French books, it is bound in paper. It is printed on thin paper of less than medium quality. Its text pages in appearance are as unattractive as those of a government report. It is full of typographical errors; although one can never be certain in "Ulysses" whether a printing affront is a mistake or one of Mr. Joyce's eccentricities what his followers call his originalities. All in all, the book is a muddy, slovenly job; and in a land of low printing costs it retails for sixty francs.

Sylvia Beach justifies the price at which "Ulysses" is sold by its great length, which is three times that of an ordinary novel. But if there is wide circulation for a book, its mere length ought to cut no great figure in its price. Its paper and binding costs are much more important elements. "Ulysses" has now run through four editions. Miss Beach does not divulge the number of copies printed for each edition.

Although she maintains that most of the buyers of "Ulysses" are serious Joyce students, the fact remains that with the advent of the tourist season the book appears in the windows of a number of bookstores, both English and French, in the downtown section of Paris. And there is little doubt that many buy it for its enormities. If

any filth hunter, however, thinks that in "Ulysses" he is getting a piece of light reading, the joke is on him. Most of "Ulysses" is hard going. In any paragraph the thoughts expressed, and expressed without punctuation guides for the reader, may be variously Mr. Joyce's or those of one of his characters or those of some person of whom the character is at the moment thinking; it takes close and practised attention to disentangle them and make the narrative intelligible.

The man who raised this monument of obscenity and flashing phrase, of calculated and even childish eccentricity and of limpid English, is not the sort of man one might expect such an author to be. He is quiet in appearance, unusually shy and retiring in disposition, and forty finds him the domesticated head of a family consisting of a wife and two grown sons, one of whom has a bass voice which resounds Sunday mornings in the choir of St. Luke's chapel in the Latin Quarter. Many a journalist seeks to interview James Joyce, but few succeed. His friends say, however, that when he is surrounded by his intimates he talks fluently and delightfully and not at all in the unreal manner of the style of "Ulysses".

James Joyce may or may not be living in the Latin Quarter in Paris one never knows. When it comes to a place of abode Mr. Joyce shows the same restlessness that afflicted the Greek hero in whom he saw the analogy and prototype to the leading character in his novel. Joyce spent five years in the composition of the three hundred thousand words of "Ulysses". In those five years he moved thirty times and lived for brief spells in thirty different places in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. The Latin Quarter, however, more than any other place can claim

him as its citizen, for he is usually to be found in one or another of its hotels working away at the new novel which is to succeed "Ulysses" and which Sylvia Beach is going to publish.

Whatever the outside opinion about Mr. Joyce may be, to the young intellectuals of the Latin Quarter he is nothing less than both Allah and his Prophet. They see Joyce as the supreme modern master of English and "Ulysses" as the turning point of the modern novel and as a phase of literary education through which anyone must progress who pretends to write significant fiction today. The young intellectuals are not clamorous in these views - they simply state them. A person does not argue hotly about the size of the Pacific Ocean. It stands there for itself; and if your intellect cannot discern its greatness, so much the worse for your intellect.

Joyce and "Ulysses" being the shibboleth, it becomes easy to identify the young intellectual group of Paris with approximate definiteness. There are some minor figures, but they report at the bookshop only now and then and are not truly significant of the circle. The rest, the outstanding personages of this interlocking directorate of the Continental advance movement in English letters, are by name McAlmon, Ford, Bird, Hemingway, Antheil, and Pound. And, of course, Sylvia Beach and James Joyce himself.

Joyce is an Irishman, but the rest of the group are Americans, with the exception of Ford Madox Ford. Ford Madox Ford, whose name used to be Ford Madox Hueffer, is an Englishman - a large, ponderous Englishman who publishes in Paris a magazine called "the transatlantic review". It is called that without capital letters, too, Mr. Ford having adopted this millinery shop originality on the maga

zine's cover. The device is typical of a good share of the originality of the young intellectuals. Be different, even if you have to drop your capital letters. Joyce drops a lot of his.

It is, however, more or less of a struggle for Mr. Ford to be a young intellectual, the discoverer and contemporary and occasional collaborator of Joseph Conrad being scarcely a youth any more. youth any more. The resulting strain, which one seems to detect in much that Mr. Ford writes, may bear upon the dulness of the uncapitalized review, which Mr. Ford ballasts almost to the deep-load line with his own literary production, inserted either anonymously or under his current or his sometime name. Besides the columns of his own magazine, Mr. Ford has access to those of various journals that matter both in America and England; and as he frequently writes about the doings of the young intellectuals of Paris, he is the chief celebrant of the group.

William C. Bird is a fairly recent convert. The young intellectuals captured him and took him to their bosoms, and he is now one of them. Not so long ago, during part of the war in fact, Bird- who is Bill Bird to his fellows was a newspaper reporter in Washington, a member of one of the New York bureaus there. Newspapers still provide him with his principal means of support, for he is the Paris correspondent of a well known American syndicate. In addition Bird is a connoisseur of French wines, and he has recently published a book of his own written not at all in the young intellectual style. It is a concise, accurate, and practical manual of wines how to know them, how to buy them, and how to drink them. For the young intellectuals it was Ezra Pound who sprinkled the salt on

this particular Bird's tail. All his life Bill Bird had wanted to go into the printing business. As a boy he had fussed with printing presses; and when he found himself set down comfortably in Paris for what looked like a good long tenure of office, he decided that the opportunity was at hand to gratify his hobby. So he bought a fine hand press and other equipment and set up a printing shop on one of the quays of the Ile St.-Louis, with the idea of producing books of the Mosher type.

About this time Ernest Hemingway introduced Bill Bird to Ezra Pound, and the poet's fertile brain at once conceived of a greater destiny for the new publishing house. Why (he asked Bird) be content to repeat what others have done ad nauseam? Why get out any more de luxe "Rubaiyats" and "Kubla Khans" when there are the unpublished works of living men and women equally deserving of such form? In other words, why not help lead the advance in letters and establish that rare, that almost unique thing, a publishing house hospitable to the free and rebellious spirits of contemporary literature?

Whereupon Mr. Pound, with the acquiescence of Mr. Bird, undertook to get together the manuscripts for a book list which should be a cross section of contemporary writing of significance, or rather (to quote the prospectus) "a critical enquiry into the state of prose in 1922-3". For the sake of those who would be well informed about what is going on in letters, this list of titles is here inserted:

It includes "Indiscretions" by Ezra Pound himself; "Women and Men" by Ford Madox Ford; and "In Our Time" by Ernest Hemingway - three of the six titles therefore by members of the Paris circle. The volume entitled "The Great American Novel"

is by W. C. Williams, an American country doctor who was a college mate of Ezra Pound's. “Elimus" is by B. C. Windeler, a British wool broker who was a colonel with the Air Force in India when he wrote it; and "England" is by B. M. G. Adams, an upper class Englishwoman. class Englishwoman. Three British authors, three American.

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All these books have been published by the Three Mountains Press Bird named his establishment - and beautifully published, on handmade paper, forty to eighty pages to the volume, two dollars per book. So thoroughly has Mr. Bird entered into the spirit of the young intellectuals that there are to be no second editions of the books, and the first editions are limited to three hundred copies, that being a sufficient number to place one in the hands of every person whose opinion could possibly matter. The Three Mountains Press publishes for the intelligent few.

The Press boasts a printer, but sometimes it is the pleasure of Mr. Bird and of Mr. Pound also to work there themselves. Now and then you can find the two of them in the little quay shop, their sleeves rolled up over their elbows and their hands inky as they pull the pages of the new ultralimited edition of Mr. Pound's epic, of which more is to be said farther on.

William Bird could be regarded as the official publisher of the bookshop group were it not for Robert McAlmon, who is not only an author and a member of the circle but also a publisher of books. His house is the Contact Publishing Company, the address of which is Miss Beach's bookshop. The Contact Publishing Company now has a list of seven books of the sort, as its unitalicized prospectus says, "not likely to be published by other publishers for commercial or

legislative reasons". Just as necessary to the rebellion in letters as the free Parisian atmosphere is a free avenue of public expression, which accounts for the three publishing ventures Miss Beach's, Mr. Bird's, Mr. McAlmon's which the young intellectuals have set up for themselves in Paris. Assuming that the stupidity or commercialism of American publishers is stifling our most advanced genius, at any rate no broad public harm is being done, if we take the valuation which the young intellectuals set upon their own work. The edition of each of these Three Mountains and Contact books is limited to three hundred copies, and the announcements promise that there will be no subsequent printings. Thus if there should happen to be a masterpiece among them, it must, until copyrights expire, remain unknown to the people, a legend, unavailable even at many public libraries.

Mr. Bird has published a book by Ernest Hemingway and so has Mr. McAlmon. This fact and the further one that he is intimate with the bookshop circle seem to mark Mr. Hemingway for young intellectualism's own; but there are indications that his sojourn is to be only temporary. In other words, his work promises to remove him from the three-hundredcopy class of authorship. One of his short stories was proclaimed by the O'Brien anthology to be the best of the 1923 crop, and he has recently finished a novel which is said to break new ground. While an admirer of James Joyce, Hemingway is in no sense an imitator of him; he pursues his own ways, and his friends expect him to go far. He is a young man of vigorous health and physique who has been soldier and war correspondent, who now represents a Toronto newspaper in Paris, is versed in European politics,

and is occasionally assigned by one or another of the New York newspapers to report some peace conference or League of Nations meeting; and who when not writing in his quarters in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs mingles democratically with the artist-writer crowd at the Café du Dôme.

Quite the most engaging figure of the whole group is George Antheil. He lives in the Rue de l'Odéon just above the bookshop a convenient location, for if anybody asks for him in the bookshop Miss Beach can step to the curb and call up, and if George is at home he can signify his presence by sticking his head out of the window. George is almost offensively young - a short, chubby, fresh complexioned American boy who looks as if he might be getting through high school next year — but he nevertheless at his actual age of twenty three has a past which he would fain live down. It is risking his esteem to reveal the skeleton in his closet, but it must be done for the sake of the picture. George Antheil is, or has been, a virtuoso a performer on the piano excellent enough to win showers of applause and good notices in such critical music centres as Munich and Vienna. And he reached this celebrity

think of it! — by playing to his audiences Beethoven and Chopin.

All that is a closed book now with him. When first he heard an automatic piano play a scale he knew that the human hand and the human equation in the rendition of music were doomed. Virtuosity could never hope to equal the flawless even beauty of that performance; and so George Antheil turned to the composition of precisian, machine made music for electric driven pianos. He has already composed a string of sonatas, ballets, symphonies, and even an opera, in the new form.

He is so engaging because he is so

passionately sincere, so utterly certain that he and the handful who think with him are right about music and that the world is wrong. Start him talking, and his thoughts and ideas jostle each other in their hurry for utterance. He thinks of music as a grey polished shaft of high speed steel

his compositions are written to be played at terrific velocity and without crescendo or pianissimo effects whatsoever. He hates long hair and virtuosity and sentiment and everything the popular taste demands in musical performance. He believes in melody but admits that only his ear and one or two others as highly trained can detect the melodies which fill his own works; others find in them only time-swift, throbbing, exciting, African war drum time and when the ordinary dissonances will not serve, George Antheil invents quarter tone sharpings and flattings for such instruments as can take them.

He thinks that Stravinsky is twenty years behind the times, that Irving Berlin comes close to being a genius, that ragtime is the most vital thing to come into music in modern times. He is indeed trying to do for ragtime what Moussorgsky did for Russian steppe music to organize it artistically and improve it, to make it more vulgar, more a thing of the people to make jazz jazzier. How, asks George Antheil, can you express America with music of the classic type? Such music was a European invention, and so, wherever it is composed, it implies Europe and sounds like Europe. America has to have its own form. He himself is an American. He was born in Trenton, the son of a Polish political exile. The sounds of Trenton its machine shops, its potteries, the Pennsylvania trains rushing through the station are the sounds of America

that he remembers. At an early age his parents took him back to Poland, and he was educated in music there and in Germany, and finally in Paris under Stravinsky, whose distant relative he is through his mother's family the Dabrowskas.

Stravinsky thus became his spiritual father and at first his fast friend; but now the two have quarreled, and George on his travels no longer gets the daily friendly telegrams he once received from his last master. But Stravinsky has stood still for years, and George has gone on ahead. Who is the more significant of the two now as a composer of advanced music? George by actual count has had a hundred and ten riots at his concerts in Europe; and how many, he asks scornfully, has Stravinsky had? Only one. That ought to prove something. In fact, the only unriotous concert in which George ever played his own modern compositions took place in Paris last winter; and that was a paper house, invited by Ezra Pound, which was too highbrow to riot.

So George Antheil talks - tremendously in earnest, tremendously believing in himself, and tremendously youthful: a stocky high school boy with cropped neutral color hair that sticks up in back and won't hold a part. He warms to his theme and tells about the trip he made alone into the heart of Africa across desert and veld - to gather native jazz themes; filled a notebook with them several hundred. He rushes to the closet and drags therefrom an evil smelling goatskin drum he brought from Africa, and pounds upon this instrument and yells savage jungle tunes until his hair is more tousled than ever, his face flushed, and his forehead dewed with sweat.

His six "Savage Sonatas for the Piano", his "Ballet Mécanique", his