Reader’s Choice: The serious journal of ideas, such as the old North American Review, or the more recent Atlantic under Sedgwick, cannot now find a reading public interested enough to support it. But before we write off the serious reader as an extinct species, consider the phenomena of the paperbacks. At a price comparable to a magazine, an amazing variety of books is available in nearly every field at top intellectual levels.

Beacon has recently reprinted two books of interest to libertarians who like occasionally to loosen the soil around the roots of their ideas. They are Ernest Cassirer’s The Philosophy of the Enlightenment and Elie Hal-evy’s account of the utilitarians, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. If there is a public for books like this, all is not lost.

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Labor Monopoly: Donald Richberg, one of the country’s best informed men on labor union matters, has delivered an address entitled, “How Shall We Deal with Labor Union Monopolies?”

Copies may be had at ten cents each by writing to The Economic Club of Detroit, 920 Detroit Free Press Building, 321 West La Fayette Avenue, Detroit 26, Michigan.

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Small Fry: Mrs. A. G. Boylston of Grosse Point Park, Michigan, writes, “Why don’t you add a children’s book review section so that libertarian parents can be sure they aren’t missing any good books?” I don’t know where this journal would find space for a children’s book section, but it might make room to pass along the names of books which libertarian parents have found to their tastes. Close to the top of any such list would be the Little House in the Woods series, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. We read the series to our daughter during her fifth year and the pleasure was mutual. On her sixth birthday she got the handsome new Harper edition of the eight volumes illustrated by Garth Williams, and we’ve gone through the entire set again. The books are unsurpassed as an authentic picture of Laura Ingall’s own family, which settled in the West shortly after the Civil War. American life has evoked extraordinary qualities from ordinary people, and Mrs. Wilder’s books awaken that possibility in a new generation.

Edmund A. Opitz, Staff Member of FEE