of a greasy spoon on Harvard Square. Genuinely shy, utterly concentrated and not easy to approach or get to know, he was at bottom a warm and compassionate man, with reciprocated devotion to an army of one-time students and colleagues.

Langer transformed the Book Review section and set its shape for the next seventy years, as an attempt to note briefly but critically just about all the important books that appeared on international matters, initially in a wide range of languages. On that point he shared Coolidge's view and was famous for responding, when a student pleaded that he had not examined certain materials because they were in Czech, that the library did have Czech grammars and dictionaries!

Research confirms the legend of how Langer operated. A month before thereviews had to be in, the magazine's office would assemble all the candidates for review more than 100 at a time pack them in a large crate and ship them to Langer in Cambridge. In two weeks or so back would come the reviews, all done by him alone.

I hasten to add that by the late 1930s this was no longer possible and the review section was federalized into subject sections, edited at first by the Managing Editor and then by a separate Book Review Editor. It has remained a keystone of the magazine, contributing to scholarship and to current opinion alike by combining breadth and in most cases brevity.

Early in its first decade, in a time that saw the launching of many New York-based magazines (notably Time