and then when you had turned to page 93, cursing yourself for a fool as you did it, you only found:
If my name you would discover
Look upon the inside cover,
and so on, and so on, until you were ready to drop from weariness and exasperation. Hang me!" he suddenly exploded, "if I had the say of it, I'd bury 'em alive in cocoanut taffy—I told the Boss so, myself."
I agreed with him that they were getting off easy.
"A lot of them are named 'Gerty,' too," he added, as though that made matters worse.
Then he showed me a great crowd of older people. They were mostly men, though there were one or two women here and there.
"These are the annotators," he said, "the people who work off their idiotic opinions on the margins and fly-leaves of books. They dispute the author's statements, call him a liar and abuse him generally. The one on the end used to get all the biographies of Shakespeare he could find and cover every bit of blank paper in them with pencil-writing signed 'A Baconian.' He usually began with the statement: 'The author of this book is a pig-headed fool.' The man next to him believed that the earth is flat, and he aired that theory so extensively with a fountain-pen that he ruined about two hundred dollars' worth of books. They caught him and put him in jail for six months, but he will have to take his medicine here just the same. There are two religious cranks standing just behind him. At least, they were cranks about religion. One of them was an atheist and he used to write blasphemy all over religious books. The other suffered from too much religion. He would jot down texts and pious mottoes in every book he got hold of. He would cross out, or scratch out all the oaths and cuss words in a book; draw a pencil line through any reference to wine, or strong drink, and call especial attention to any passage or phrase he thought improper by scrawling over it. He is tied to the atheist, you notice. The woman in the second row used to write 'How true!' after any passage or sentence that pleased her. She gets only six years. Most of the others will have to keep it up for eight."
"Keep what up?" I asked.
"Climbing barbed-wire fences," was the answer; "they don't have to hurry, but they must keep moving. They begin to-morrow at half-past seven."
We walked down the hill toward a group of infamous looking people. My guide stopped and pointed toward them.