A Christmas Book:  An Anthology for Moderns by D.B. Wyndham Lewis and G.C. Heseltine is a 320-page hardcover published by E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1928.  There is no dust jacket.  The spine is slightly cocked.  Inside, the pages are clean and unmarked.

Book Summary

The feast of Christmas proper extends from the Vigil to Twelfth Night.  For the purposes of this anthology we have occasionally in a rich and careless manner assumed the Feast to overlap a few days on either side of the Rubric.  

The following essentials to any Christmas Anthology will be found nowhere in this Anthology:  extracts from Dickens, Pepys (with one exception), and (with one exception) Washington Irving, and reference (with one exception) to Father Christmas; also fake-Gothic carols (including Good King Wenceslas), robins, property Yule-logs, synthetic snow, red-faced jovial Squires, wigs by Clarkson, Ye Olde Englysshe Yuletyde Cheere (18–), and all manifestations of the coloured Christmas Supplement.  We have omitted Dickens–with a graceful gambade of reverence in the direction of the Master’s shrine–because he is universal and instantly accessible, if the key to the bookcase in the morning-room can be found.  Pepys, again, is to-day about as rare and secret as the Piccadully Tube.  Washington Irving is kind, but tedious.  Father Christmas, Santa Claus, or Sankt Klaus, is the Victorian nursery substitute for the Christ-Child taken over from the Dutch Calvinists of New Amsterdam, fabulous, in this incarnation, as the griffin, and now indigenous during the season to Oxford Street.  The simili-Gothic carol and the Drury Lane wassailings which stirred Thackeray’s bile about the year 1860 are also utilitarian, as is likewise that ensuing vague benevolence towards–as someone has said–those we rather like, which tired leader-writers writing leaders for dear life call The Christmas Spirit, and which is essentially gastric.