entered his shop a wealthy patron of
the arts and muses called with a volume which he wished to have rebound.

"I can send it to Paris or to London," said my bookseller. "If you have
no choice of binder, I will entrust it to Zaehnsdorf with instructions
to lavish his choicest art upon it."

"But indeed I HAVE a choice," cried the plutocrat, proudly. "I noticed
a large number of Grolier bindings at the Art Institute last week, and
I want something of the same kind myself. Send the book to Grolier,
and tell him to do his prettiest by it, for I can stand the expense, no
matter what it is."

Somewhere in his admirable discourse old Walton has stated the theory
that an angler must be born and then made. I have always held the same
to be true of the bookseller. There are many, too many, charlatans in
the trade; the simon-pure bookseller enters upon and conducts
bookselling not merely as a trade and for the purpose of amassing
riches, but because he loves books and because he has pleasure in
diffusing their gracious influences.

Judge Methuen tells me that it is no longer the fashion to refer to
persons or things as being "simon-pure"; the fashion, as he says,
passed out some years ago when a writer in a German paper "was led into
an amusing blunder by an English review. The reviewer, having occasion
to draw a distinction between George and Robert Cruikshank, spoke of
the former as the real Simon Pure. The German, not understanding the
allusion, gravely told his readers that George Cruikshank was a
pseudonym, the author's real name being Simon Pure."

This incident is given in Henry B. Wheatley's "Literary Blunders," a
very charming book, but one that could have been made more interesting
to me had it recorded the curious blunder which Frederick Saunders
makes in his "Story of Some Famous Books." On page 169 we find this
information: "Among earlier American bards we instance Dana, whose
imaginative poem 'The Culprit Fay,' so replete with poetic beauty, is a
fairy tale of the highlands of the Hudson. The origin of the poem is
traced to a conversation with Cooper, the novelist, and Fitz-Greene
Halleck, the poet, who, speaking of the Scottish streams and their
legendary associations, insisted that the American rivers were not
susceptible of like poetic treatment. Dana thought otherwise, and to
make his position good produced three days after this poem."

It may be that Saunders wrote the name Drake, for it was Jam