Now one way to interest people who don’t care about books for books’ sake is to get up attractive pages, with pleasant or enticing headlines, with pictures, with jokes in the corners of ’em, with some new and original and not-hitherto-published matter in them, with poetry (all kinds), with large type, with signed articles so that the reader can know who wrote it and like or hate him with the necessary personal tag. But these things aren’t literary, at all. They are just plain human and fall in the field of action of every editor alive--though of course editors who are dead are exempt from dealing with them. That is why a literary editor has no need to be literary and, indeed, had better not be if it is going to prevent his being human. We have been talking about the literary editor of a book section. There are not many book sections in this country. There are hundreds of book pages--half-pages and whole pages and double pages. The word “technique” is a loathsome thing and really without any significance in this connection, inasmuch as there is no particular way of doing the news of books well, and certainly no one way of doing it that is invariably better than any other. But for convenience we may permit ourselves to use the word “technique” for a moment; and, permission granted, we will merely say that the technique of a book page or pages is entirely different from the technique of a book section--if you know what we mean. Clarified (we hope) it comes down to this, that things which a fellow would attempt in a book section he would not essay in a book page or double page. Conversely, things that will make a page successful may be out of place in a section. It is by no means wholly a matter of newspaper makeup, though there is that to it, too. But a man with a book section, though not necessarily more ambitious, is otherwisely so. For one thing, he expects to turn his reporters loose on more books than his colleague who has only a page or so to turn around in. For another, he will probably want to print a careful list of all books he receives, of whatever sort, with a description of each as adequate as he can contrive in from twenty to fifty words, plus title, author, place of publication, publisher and price. Such lists are scanned by publishers, booksellers, librarians, readers in search of books on special subjects--by pretty nearly everybody who reads the section at all. Even the rather prosaic quality of such a list has its value. A woman down in Texas writes to the literary editor that there is too much conscious cleverness in lots of the stuff he prints, “but the lists of books are delightful”! There you are. In editing a book section you must be all things to all women.