A London Bookman Looks Back

The office of the literary paper that gave me my first job in London was hidden away in a Victorian building near Covent Garden market. You mounted a flight of Dickensian stairs and off a dark little landing were three or four small rooms. I occupied a corner of one of them, close to a black fireplace from which smoke eddied on stormy days. The single window faced east, and the sun never came through its dusty panes, even at the height of summer. In my recollections of that room the season is always winter, and the time most often late afternoon, with a fire glowing in the ugly barred grate. Such offices still exist no doubt, but there cannot be many of them left. Literary journalists to‐day are likely to work in centrally heated rooms with walls that are all window. They do not climb stairs; they use “elevators.” Progress, progress; yet I sometimes wonder if they write any better than we did in the thirties, which now seem to belong to a vanished epoch. Certainly they fill far fewer columns.