It has been my experience that people who really do things (in contradistinction to talking about them) are very straightforward, sensible persons, without sentimentalism in the pursuit of their ideal. Mr. Monro was exactly this. He was spending his energy to give poetry the dignity and charm of presentation it had lost at the hands of the commercial booksellers; he was encouraging poets and allowing their books a chance; but he did not talk ideals, nor dress like a combination of a fool and a wild animal. He was too busy to pose, he was just “on the job.” And what “on the job” meant and means is best told by giving the history of his enterprise. For some years Mr. Monro had lived abroad, in Switzerland and Italy. But the nostalgia of home took possession of him, and he returned to England. Shortly after his arrival The Poetry Society asked him to edit a magazine for them, and he consented, and _The Poetry Review_ began in January, 1912. Mr. Monro not only edited the _Review_, but paid for it. Now the Poetry Society, like all such bodies, is conservative, and Mr. Monro is sown with the seeds of radicalism. So differences of policy began, and at the end of a year, Mr. Monro seceded from _The Poetry Review_ and founded another review, _Poetry and Drama_, to be published quarterly. But I am anticipating. While editing _The Poetry Review_ Mr. Monro conceived the idea of having a bookshop, which should be at once the office of the review and its various publications, and a shop. An old house in Devonshire Street was leased and everything “en train,” when Mr. Monro found that the inevitable breach with The Poetry Society on matters of policy was imminent. He announced in _The Poetry Review_ the foundation of a new magazine, a quarterly, and relinquished _The Poetry Review_ into other hands after having founded it and edited it for twelve months. On January 8th, 1913, The Poetry Bookshop opened its doors to the public, and the public, always caught by novelty, flocked in. Professor Henry Newbolt gave the opening address. The first publication of the Bookshop, _Georgian Poets_, an anthology of the work of Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke, W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, James Elroy Flecker, Wilfred Wilson Gibson, D. H. Lawrence, John Masefield, James Stephens, Harold Monro himself, and others, had already appeared. This book has been extraordinarily successful, and, in two years, has gone through ten editions.