WHEN the "Biography of the Life of Manuel" was reprinted in its final form, Mr. Cabell saw fit to introduce each volume with a special commentary. In these notes, which are now collected in "Preface to the Past", he talks amiably of authorship and his reputation for pornography, of the regrettable failure of his books to make money for their publishers and the curious willingness of the House of McBride to continue publishing them. With some wonder he remarks that his books have rarely failed to evoke passionately unfavorable criticism, unadulterated by the least rationality, from all the better-thought-of reviewers. Of these and other bookish matters he speaks with wit and charm.

As a whole, these short notes combine to make a singularly entertaining history of the literary tastes of the United States since 1900. They recall the prudery of the early 1900s, which "labored with a quiet stubbornness to restrict every character in magazine fiction to possessing, corporeally, just hands, feet, and a face." In 1915 they record that Sinclair Lowis, then reading for Doran Co., rejected "The Cream of the Jest", "because the general public simply cannot be induced to buy novels about unattractive and ignoble people." They comment in passing upon the era of the twenties, when "we writing persons, upon both sides, fought out, in our books, our magazines, and our newspapers, a fine, rough-and-tumble game which we high-heartedly called a literary movement."

Such then is the last book which Mr. Cabell has presented to a world still heedless of his talents. Though it will never grace the weekly list of best sellers, its writer possesses a wit and feltcity of style unique among contemporary Americans.