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WHATEVER MAN PERPETRATES, the printing press indelibly perpetuates. The salting of bibliographic borrow pits with glittery falsehoods is therefore a reprehensible imposition on posterity. When hoax, forgery, mischief, and fraud are buried in tomes, they enjoy an immortality seldom accorded truth. Tricks may, perhaps, be more illustrious and diverting than truth; they certainly are more difficult to crush to earth. They have one salutary utility, however. They can be used to test the credibility of books and reference sets.

When it comes to choosing names, man is at a loss for words. There are far too many Jones's to “keep up with”. Smith is decidedly the most popular surname in Britain and America, but Johnson, Brown, and Miller are prevalent, too. Since the United States of America is a great melting pot, it enjoys a superabundance of names but does not know how to apportion them. Elsdon C. Smith, author of The Story of Our Names, estimates that there are 350,000 different surnames in the United States, but that fifty popular names suffice for ten per cent of the population. Not even a thousand names are required for fifty per cent of the population. In England, fifty common surnames provide for approximately eighteen per cent of the population. So far as appellations are concerned, however, Scotland is the thrifty nation; one hundred and fifty surnames sufficing for more than fifty per cent of all native Caledonians.

PETER MARK ROGET died on 12 September 1869, Nevertheless, he is more widely known today than he ever was in his heyday. His name has endured a full century, and may indeed endure for ever, primarily because of the great popularity, extraordinary sale, and unforgettable title of his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. This astonishing collection of interchangeable parts of speech, ‘classified and arranged … so as to facilitate the expression of ideas and assist in literary composition’, was first published in 1852, long after Roget had retired from medical practice and shortly after he had given up his post as secretary of the Royal Society. He was already 73 years old, but since he could not slacken his habitual pace, he continued to work unceasingly on revision after revision until there were twenty‐eight revisions when he died seventeen years later. After his death, his son, John Lewis Roget, edited the Thesaurus until 1908; a grandson, Samuel Romilly Roget, then took over the editorship and retained control over the legacy until 1936.

Many years ago a thrifty house‐wife presided over a men's boardinghouse near the campus of a well‐known American university. Often while planning daily menus, the hard pressed matron would appeal to her houseboy, “What shall we serve for dessert?” He persistently recommended, “Ice cream and cake,” but she invariably rejected this extravagant proposal, derisively reminding him, “The boys don't like ice cream and cake.” Then, with painstaking concern, she would judiciously select tapioca, chocolate pudding, or some other gelatinous concoc‐tion. Since all the young college students had ravenous appetites and greedily consumed anything set before them, they always confirmed the sagacious selections of the frugal dame. When anyone asked her what college boys liked most for dessert, she had her time‐proven answer, “Tapioca”. She knew that “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

“Questionable” books are as easily identified and as quickly discovered as brightly dyed Easter eggs. The titles of such books invariably terminate with interrogation marks; not with dots, dashes, or asterisks. Nevertheless, even a well read scholar finds himself hard put to recollect half a dozen illustrative titles unless he has previously indulged in considerable bibliographic dowsing. The reason so few examples readily come to mind is that intriguing interrogatory titles are actually few in number.

IF SONS DID NOT EXTOL, many a worthy father would sink into oblivion and forever go unsung. As filial biographers, however, sons customarily meet with intimidating scorn and derision. There is a generally accepted notion that consanguineous biography is fraught more with fealty and filial frailty than with disinterested depiction. The best way to disprove this false assumption is to muster meritorious biographies written by scions and compare them with representative biographies of the ‘blame and blemish’ variety. Sympathetic assessment always stands up stronger than ostensible objectivity, for writers of the ‘warts and all’ kind of biography lose track of virtues and nearly always become engrossed in the imperfections of their victims.

LET'S VARY LITERACEE with a little bibliographic burglaree. If you suddenly feel like humming The Pirates of Penzance or recollecting Gilbert and Sullivan, you are closely attuned to the bibliographic thoughts in my mind. Literary allusions are the rich overtones that make reading and writing a grand collaboration and a happy pursuit. An author may conscientiously write to convey ideas, but if a cut above the average, he always strives as did H. L. Mencken to express his ideas ‘in suave and ingratiating terms, and to discharge them with a flourish, and maybe with a phrase of pretty song’. His creative efforts will be mostly wasted, however, if his readers lack the requisite literary background and sophistication that would enable them to join in his game and share his earnest effusions. Literacy is never enough; a young child can read and understand the six one‐syllable words ‘who steals my purse, steals trash’, but that same child can grow to be a mighty old man without ever fully comprehending the sentence unless he reads Othello and studies Iago's presumptuous remarks on ‘Good name in man and woman’.

American children practice certain commendable but anomalous self restraints that are hard to account for. They seem to comprehend that beer, wine, and ardent spirits are for adults, while soda‐pops are for young people. So long as they may participate in all festivities, that is all that matters. Mother and father drink coffee, but the children clamour for milk. The reason for the abstention could possibly be that soda‐pops and milk taste sweeter than caffeine and alcohol. One further example is worthy of note. Little boys and girls like to watch their papas light up a pipe or smoke a cigar. The children may like to play with matches and pretend to smoke, but they seem to understand that smoking is not for children. Aside from these exceptions, little children assume their natural role only when they find that to be more profitable than to play “the man.”

Bibliographers and book collectors must continue to endure “Double, double toil and trouble” so long as publishers refuse to heed Lord Falkland's wise dictum:— “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” Some American and British publishers simply will not let well enough alone in accepting book titles. They persist in issuing books under one title on one side of the ocean and under another title on the other side of the ocean. Prospective book buyers must therefore spend considerable time verifying title entries and comparing the contents of books if they wish to avoid a duplication of an author's works. In 1940, Hodder & Stoughton of London published John Buchan's joyful recollections, Memory Hold ‐ the ‐ Door. The Houghton Mifflin Company of Boston simultaneously released the book under the title, Pilgrim's Way. It would be interesting to learn how many librarians and bibliophiles unwittingly duplicated the memoirs in the innocent belief that they were acquiring distinct narratives. Either title was appropriate, but the dual titles resulted in confusion.

A writer who cannot coin a phrase soon learns that rhyme does not pay. This need not deter him, however. Lacking the ability to prey upon words, he can continue to play with words. In short, he can aspire to become Jack of all charades and good at pun. The imbecility of Jack of all japes was thoroughly exposed by Joseph Addison in several early issues of The Spectator. Isaac D'Israeli added further analyses and good illustrations in his Curiosities of Literature. A more comprehensive inventory of type vice is interwoven in the verses of the second book of Richard Owen Cambridge's satirical poem, The Scribleriad. Cambridge singled out for extinction acrostics, the amphisbaena, anagrams, antitheses, boutsrimés, centos, chronograms, conundrums, crambos, doggerels, echoes, fustian, lipograms, macaronic compositions, puns, quibbles, reciprocal verses (likewise known as retrograde or recurrent verses, including palindromes), the rhopalic sequence, riddle and rebus (“Riddle's dearest son”), and finally, rondeaus. He overlooked several other forms of literary laceration judged by Addison to be “tricks in writing as required much time and little capacity.”