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Thirty Years On

DALLAS PRATT

FTER thirty years as editor of the Columns I told them I
was going to retire. Why? they asked. Because of the
"thirty," was my answer. If I don't do it now I'll have
to wait for the forty. "Forty years on . . .," that dread phrase, al¬
though we sang it merrily enough as boys at school as we rumbled
through the green New Hampshire lanes in horse-drawn barges
on the way to an afternoon of rowing.

I gave another reason for retiring: "I want to have more time to
write." So they immediately asked me to write a retrospective
article about my years with the Columns. Hoist with my own
petard!

When I said I was leaving because I wanted to write, I more
truthfully might have said, "write and read." The luxury of it! to
read all the things one doesn't have to read; to behold, in iVIilton's
words, "the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air
of delightfvil studies"; to read, like Proust, in a room "saturated
with the bouquet of silence"; or to settle down behind a rampart
of books in one of those great libraries whose very names arc bib-
liointoxicants: iVIarciana, Trivulziana, Ambrosiana. . . .

None of these have I visited, but had I been a member of the
Grolier Club, I could have seen them all, and been grandly re¬
ceived by mayors, on that club's 1962 library tour of Italy. Rich¬
ard Brown Baker wrote about it in the November 1962 Colunrns,