BOOKS The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers, (Dover, paper , 284 pp., $3 .50) . This underground classic is a book for lovers. That explains I think why it has been reprinted from time to time since 1903, and why it's brought out now in a handsome, cheap, readable edition. The yarn opens with the shy love of two young men for each other, young men adrift in their first years after college, seeking meanings in life and roles in what seems to us the incredibly stable, ordered world of Edwardian England . They find themselves, and perhaps their metiers, in a somewhat overheated plot of spying and skullduggery, sailing in a small converted lifeboat in the low-lying islands and tidal sands of the German Frisian coast. Sailing people pride themselves on knowing what a No. 3 Rippingille stove is, from this novel, and a small band of literary aficianados accounts some of its prose the finest ever written in English on the experience of sailing. It is then a kind of love affair with the sea, centered on the yawl Du/cibel/a, a demure, somewhat dowdy, but s9ciable and stout-hearted boat whose character shines through her ventures in one of the world's more unusual crusing grounds. Love is expressed in working men and boats too: old Bartels in his coastal galliot Johannes irradiates some cabin and rainy October canal scenes with a memorable affectionate presence that seems to extend and have continuance beyond the printed page. Clara has more difficulty getting off the page, a girl so English she belies her German name and family situation, giving away a key point in the plot rather early-but who cares? She does get off the page. You'd have to be a brutish lout not to fall for her yourself, with her "brown, firm hand-no, not so very small, my sentimental reader" . And there is love of country: Carruthers and Davies for theirs, Commander Bruning of the torpedo boat Blitz for his-a sentiment which even if the reader has not felt it much himself, he should perhaps not lightly knock. The Edwardian evening ended. Its epitaph is written in the names of young men killed before their time at places like Passchendael and Ypres, painted on the stone entryways of Eton College. Childers himself was shot by a firing squad (with each of whose members he had first shaken hands) outside Beggar's Bush Barracks in Ireland in 1922-even his friends said he pursued the cause of total Irish independence too far into
violence. He died, he said "full of intense love for Ireland." My word, what a lover! And how that love springs to life today in The Riddle (which is at least five kinds of genre novel and transcends them all), a story much addressed to things timeless and forever young and full of completely natural grace . PMS Whaling and the Art of Scrimshaw, by Charles R. Meyer (New York, McKay, 1976. 269 pp., illus., index, $17.95). The world seems full of overpriced, lavishly produced books aimed at the gift market-but, reader, this is not one of them! Here indeed is a beautiful and not inexpensive book, but it's worth the price of admission. Meyer's text is admirably up to its subject, making both a good introduction to scrimshaw, and companion for the aficianado. He delves rewardingly into the conditions of hard, stinking, dirty work, boredom and extreme discomfort amid which the art of scrimshaw came into being. Three to five years at sea in all climates, plagued by insects in the tropics and frozen in pursuit of a wet, risky calling in the polar regions, sick with scurvy, crowded into a dank, smelly forecastle, living always with danger of death beneath the cachalot's flukes, such was the whaling man's world, which he entered into, often, involuntarily as a shanghai victim. The materials of his art, ivory teeth, bone and lampblack, were plentiful and usually free. The tools, penknife and sailmaker's needle, were at hand. His favorite subject was the thermopylae of his own existence: an eggshell boat and hapless crew crushed by the angry whale as the mother ship and sister boats watch in the offing. Folk humor and legend born of long hours of tale-spinning forward were recorded: Old Stormalong, the sailing Paul Bunyan, measuring four fathom from the deck to the bridge of his nose, Piccolo Ike, the whistling whale, and his encounter with Bowleg Bill were common subjects. Other products of the scrimshander's art included swifts for winding yarn, pen stands, pipes, spoons, jagging wheels, candle stands, boxes and wooden objects of all kinds inlaid with bits of ivory. It's thought there were some 150-200,000 sailors who tried their hands at scrimshaw between 1825 and 1865. Most of the products were inferior and wound up over the side; the surviving pieces are the best, probably, and Meyer postulates that much of the surviving work was not done aboard ship at all, but by retired salts ashore. He also finds simi-
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