Books: Recent & Readable: Jul. 22, 1940

THE MIXTURE AS BEFORE — W. Somerset Maugham —Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). Ten stories, which he says will be his last, told with the elderly tartness and urbanity for which the author (last reported escaped from Paris to Gibraltar) is famed. All are infallibly readable, and if tricky, transparently so.

WORDS AND THEIR MEANINGS — Aldous Huxley — Ward Ritchie Press, Los Angeles ($1.50). Semantics is the science of the meaning of words. It is also the study of the meaninglessness of much that passes for meaning. The discoverers in this science of intelligibility, I. A. Richards (TIME, July 15), C. K. Ogden, Count Alfred Korzybski, are as unintelligible to plain readers as the popularizers (such as Stuart Chase) are misleading. Aldous Huxley’s short essay, though it says little that is new, is the first lucid and reliable introduction to the subject.