A Solider's Christmas Reader [antikvár]

The Editor Sticks His Neck Out [I.E.: PREFACE] Next to the oft-repeated pleasures of eating and drinking, next to the repeated pleasure of making love, the compilation of this volume has proved the most enjoyable act of my life. For I have had to go back over the voluminous reading of thirty years, to determine what words which I have read could now be read with enjoyment by a soldier. This is a book which is to be given to a soldier, which is to find its way into the hands of a soldier, a soldier who may be in a training camp in Florida or Wisconsin or Texas or California, a soldier who may be fighting in Italy or New Guinea or the Aleutians, a soldier about whom I can safely pre-suppose only two things: that he is in uniform, and that he has learned how to read. I had decided that I would not want to put together a "reader" which would contain such gems of literary discovery that other professional literary men would tell each other how clever I am; I decided that I did not want to put together a "reader" the contents-page of which would prove it to be a selection from the contents-pages of other people's anthologies; no, I decided that I would go back over everything I could remember reading in the past thirty years, and glean from all the chaff the kernels which it now seemed to me would prove enjoyable when read by a soldier; and then print, of course, the kernels and not the chaff! v