"I make bold to say," says Brander Matthews, Professor of Dramatic Literature in Columbia University, "that Mr. Archer's is the best book that has yet been written in our language, or in any other, on the art and science of play-making. A score of serried tomes on this scheme stand side by side on my shelves, French and German, American and British; and in no one of them do I discern the clearness, the comprehensiveness, the insight, and the understanding that I find in Mr. Archer's illuminating pages. "He tells the ardent aspirant how to choose his themes; how to master the difficult art of exposition--that is, how to make his first act clear; how to arouse curiosity for what is to follow; how to hang up the interrogation mark of expectancy; how to combine, as he goes on, tension and suspension; how to preserve probability and to achieve logic for construction; how to attain climax and to avoid anti-climax; and how to bring his play to a close." * * * * * Educational The Land We Live In _The Book of Conservation_ By OVERTON W. PRICE _With an Introduction by_ GIFFORD PINCHOT "This book will have a very wide distribution, not only in libraries, but also in the schools." ROBERT P. BASS (Former Governor of New Hampshire, and President of the American Forestry Association) "It is the best primer on general conservation for older people that I have ever seen, and the good it will do will be measured only by the circulation it receives." J. B. WHITE (President of the National Conservation Congress) "I wish it were possible to have the volume made a text book for every public school." WILLIAM EDWARD COFFIN (Vice-President and Chairman of the Committee on Game Protective Legislation and Preserves, Camp Fire Club of America) _With 136 illustrations selected from 50,000 photographs_ BOY SCOUT EDITION--JACKET IN COLORS * * * * * Fiction The Best Short Stories of 1915, 1916, 1917 Edited by EDWARD J. O'BRIEN From every point of view--from that of the actual probabilities of reading enjoyment to be derived from it by all sorts of readers; from that of the vivid and varied, but always valid, concernment with life that it maintains; from that of technical literary interest in American letters, and from that of sheer esthetic response to artistic quality--THE BEST SHORT STORIES warrants an emphatic and unconditional recommendation to all.--_Life._ Indispensable to every student of American fiction, and will furnish each successive year a critical and historical survey of the art such as does not exist in any other form.--_Boston Transcript._ * * * * * War Beyond the Marne By HENRIETTE CUVRU-MAGOT