HOTEL BEMELMANS

Though this volume includes the whole of Hotel Splendide and Life Class in so far as those stories dealt with hotel life and personnel, and a number of stories from other volumes, and some which many of us read in The New Yorker, and only three wholly new ones, the general impression is of a new book, with freshness and vitality, the wit, humor, pathos, and the inimitable Bemelmans' touch. There's a sequence, a sense of unfolding adventure, an autobiographical quality that makes it particularly his. So here's a feast for Bemelmans' fans- who particularly like his stories of the personnel- the behind-scenes of a grand hotel.