D ec emh er, 192 ^ 
43 
W E’VE just been looking over the past twelve 
issues of House & Garden. As the end of the 
year is drawing close, we thought it a good idea to 
sort of balance our books and make an accounting 
of stewardship. From January to December inclu¬ 
sive, the reader has had the opportunity to read 202 
articles, to examine 65 complete houses with plans 
(there were scores more without plans) and has seen 
no less than 2,338 illustrations. In a sense. House & 
Garden is a picture book. Its text is the solo to an 
orchestral accompaniment of varied illustrations, 
consequent!}^ the text must be (and we hope it has 
been) very distinctive, and the illustrations in har¬ 
mony. 
One of these days, when we have time, we’re going 
to make a subject index of the magazine for the past 
five years, listing articles and illustrations under 
their respective heads. With an index of this kind 
in hand, the prospective builder or gardener or deco¬ 
rator could go to the public library or to her own files 
of House & Garden and cull out exactly theinforma- 
tion desired on those subjects. 
T he January issue is the Annual Building Num¬ 
ber, and it will contain some of the finest houses 
we have ever selected, ranging from the restoration 
of a Maryland homestead to the remodeling of a 
Connecticut farmhouse, from a Regency house in 
England to three small modern designs-—one in 
Denver, one in Connecticut and one on Long Island. 
In addition to these will be a discussion of combining 
building materials, a page of architectural terms 
explained, a contribution on the various sorts of 
heating plants and the second of a series on national 
types, this time, “Why Italian Houses Areltalian”. 
For good measure we add three pages of dormer win¬ 
dows and a shop page showing purchasable repro¬ 
ductions of old hardware. Miss Peyser will write on 
the use of concrete in the home. 
Those interested in decoration and furnishing will 
find the article on old clocks quite unusual. So will 
be the Portfolio interiors, the instructive article on 
Samarkand rugs, the period designs from Louis XIV 
and the pages of modernist wall papers. 
The third interest of the magazine, gardening, is 
represented by Mr. Rockwell’s article on Rhododen¬ 
drons, an article on soils—the first of a series of 
A. B. C. gardening articles and Mr. Samuel Fraser’s 
discussion of new and unusual fruits. 
Coming to you when the excitement of Christmas 
has died down, this Annual Building Number should 
prove refreshing to those who plan to build, or garden 
or decorate in the new year. May we not wish you 
all success and happiness with it! 
The 
HOUSE ^GARDEN 
BULLETIN BOARD 
I T is wiser never to let your pleasures enslave you. 
One of the pleasantest phases of Christmas giving 
is getting the gifts—their making, their purchasing. 
And yet for how many of us Christmas means a hec¬ 
tic rush from shop to shop! Every Christmas we 
vow that this will be the last—and next year we do it 
all over again! It is well to spend and be spent. 
That is the price of any pleasure given or taken, but 
we should spend wisely and be spent cautiously. To 
aid wise spending House & Garden each December 
devotes several of its pages to Christmas gift sugges¬ 
tions. We do this to help lift the burden of decision 
from our readers. The House & Garden Shopping 
Service will purchase these articles for you. We 
only ask that you make your orders clear, that you 
follow exactly the rules printed on page 76. This 
service is rendered with the utmost dispatch. It 
is expensive both in time and in actual money to 
the magazine staff. We can best help you when 
you help us. 
O F the contributors to this number of House & 
Garden some names are familiar and some new. 
Harold Donaldson Eberlein is an old contributor, in 
fact, he has been writing for this magazine since 
1911. He has to his credit nine or ten books on ar¬ 
chitecture and decoration. Miss Grace Fakes, who 
writes on Hallways, is a decorator practising in 
New York and so is Mary McBurney, who tells of 
her remodeled brownstone house in this issue. Miss 
Fakes’ article continues the series on the decoration 
of rooms being written by prominent decorators. 
It may be interesting to note that there are series of 
articles constantly starting and running through 
various issues—the decoration, the period furniture, 
the Oriental rugs, appearing in this issue. E. H. de 
Quintal is well known in the rug and carpet trade. 
The Christmas Gift suggestions, almost 200 of them, 
were selected by Margaret B. McElroy of thellousE 
& Garden editorial staff. 
I N all work there are three stages—a thinking time, 
a buying time anda timeof finalaccomplishment. 
Of nothing is this more true than of gardening work, 
and of these three seasons January is the thinking 
time par excellence. Scarcely has the smoke of Christ¬ 
mas died away than we are bombarded with seed 
and nursery catalogs. If you want really to enjoy 
your catalogs, read them leisurely all through Janu¬ 
ary. There may be a sameness about garden cata¬ 
logs in general, but the discerning gardener who 
picks and chooses will find some mighty pleasant 
reading ahead of him. 
F rom postage stamps to Sheraton chairs, from 
pearl necklaces to foot-scrapers, there is nothing 
under the sun that cannot be collected. There is 
nothing that has not somewhere and at some time 
been an object of desire to some collector. The pas¬ 
sion of collecting can focus itself on the most improb¬ 
able objects. But in all cases there is a certain spe¬ 
cialization, a limitation of field which, to anyone with 
wider interests, makes collecting seem narrow. To 
those for whom all the realm of art is interesting, it 
must seem a tiresome limitation to specialize in a 
collection of, say, nothing but Chelsea porcelain. 
The ideal, of course, would be to collect everything, 
but it is an ideal that only can be realized by the 
extremely rich. The next best thing to a universal 
collection is a collection of knowledge about the 
things in which one is interested. And a collection 
of knowledge about things materializes itself, in 
practice, into a collection of books. Instead of col¬ 
lecting Oriental rugs one might collect a library 
about them and instead of old masters, collect books 
and monographs that should, in theory, make him as 
happy as those who own the very pictures them¬ 
selves. 
I F we were asked the ideal time for Northerners to 
take a vacation, we’d say Winter. The heat and 
strain of Summer is mitigated by week-ends in the 
country, but Winter is just one long, dreary pull both 
for those who live in town and in the country. Each 
of us needs an occasional change of environment, an 
abrupt and absolute change. We need it not when 
life is lightest but when it is hardest, and for the 
majority of us Winter is both difficult and monoto¬ 
nous. To take a boat and sail to some blessed south¬ 
ern isle, to board a train and be landed in some sunny 
warm countryside, or to seek out some place where 
life can be exhilarated by winter sports^—that’s the 
prescription for the winter tired feeling. 
