The elaborate work by Careme, Le Patissier Pittoresque (1842), which contains designs for confectioners, deceived the bookseller from its plates of pavilions, temples, etc., into supposing it to be a book on architecture, and he accordingly placed it under that heading in his catalogue.
Mr. Daydon Jackson gives several instances of false classification in his Guide to the Literature of Botany, and remarks that some authors contrive titles seemingly of set purpose to entrap the unwary. He instances a fine example in the case of Bishop Alexander Ewing's Feamainn Earraghaidhiell: Argyllshire Seaweeds (Glasgow, 1872. 8vo). To enhance the delusion, the coloured wrapper is ornamented with some of the common marine alg<ae>, but the inside of the volume consists solely of pastoral addresses. Another example will be found in Flowers from the South, from the Hortus Siccus of an <p 75>Old Collector. By W. H. Hyett, F.R.S. Instead of a popular work on the Mediterranean flora by a scientific man, as might reasonably be expected, this is a volume of translations from the Italian and Latin poets. It is scarcely fair to blame the compiler of the Bibliotheca Historio-Naturalis for having ranked both these works among scientific treatises. The English cataloguer who treated as a botanical book Dr. Garnett's selection from Coventry Patmore's poems, entitled Florilegium Amantis, could claim less excuse for his blunder than the German had. These misleading titles are no new invention, and the great bibliographer Haller was deceived into including the title of James Howell's Dendrologia, or Dodona's Grove (1640), in his Bibliotheca Botanica. Professor Otis H. Robinson contributed a very interesting paper on the ``Titles of Books'' to the Special Report on Public Libraries in the United States of America (1876), in which he deals very fully with this difficulty of misleading titles, and some of his preliminary remarks are very much to the point. He writes:— <p 76>
``No act of a man's life requires more practical common sense than the naming of his book. If he would make a grocer's sign or an invoice of a cellar of goods or a city directory, he uses no metaphors; his pen does not hesitate for the plainest word. He must make himself understood by common men. But if he makes a book the case is different. It must have the charm of a pleasing title. If there is nothing new within, the back at least must be novel and taking. He tortures his imagination for something which will predispose the reader in its favour. Mr. Parker writes a series of biographical sketches, and calls it Morning Stars of the New World. Somebody prepares seven religious essays, binds them up in a book, and calls it Seven Stormy Sundays. Mr. H. T. Tuckerman makes a book of essays on various subjects, and calls it The Optimist; and then devotes several pages of preface to an argument, lexicon in hand, proving that the applicability of the term optimist is `obvious.' An editor, at intervals of leisure, indulges his true poetic taste for the pleasure of his <p 77>friends, or the entertainment of an occasional audience. Then his book appears, entitled not Miscellaneous Poems, but Asleep in the Sanctum, by A. A. Hopkins. Sometimes, not satisfied with one enigma, another is added. Here we have The Great Iron Wheel; or, Republicanism Backwards and Christianity Reversed, by J. R. Graves. These titles are neither new nor scarce, nor limited to any particular class of books. Every case, almost every shelf, in every library contain such. They are as old as the art of book-making. David's lamentation over Saul and Jonathan was called The Bow. A single word in the poem probably suggested the name. Three of the orations of <AE>schines were styled The Graces, and his letters The Muses.''
The list of bibliographical blunders might be indefinitely extended, but the subject is somewhat technical, and the above few instances will give a sufficient indication of the pitfalls which lie in the way of the bibliographer—a worker who needs universal knowledge if he is to wend his way safely through the snares in his path.
CHAPTER V.
LISTS OF ERRATA.
THE errata of the early printed books are not numerous, and this fact is easily accounted for when we recollect that these books were superintended in their passage through the press by scholars such as the Alduses, Andreas, Bishop of Aleria, Campanus Perottus, the Stephenses, and others. It is said that the first book with a printed errata is the edition of Juvenal, with notes of Merula, printed by Gabriel Pierre, at Venice, in 1478; previously the mistakes had been corrected by the pen. One of the longest lists of errata on record, which occupies fifteen folio pages, is in the edition of the works of Picus of Mirandula, printed by Knoblauch, at Strasburg, in 1507. A worse case of blundering will be found in a little book of only one <p 79>hundred and seventy-two pages, entitled Miss<ae> ac Missalis Anatomia, 1561, which contains fifteen pages of errata. The author, feeling that such a gross case of blundering required some excuse or explanation, accounted for the misprints by asserting that the devil drenched the manuscript in the kennel, making it almost illegible, and then obliged the printer to misread it. We may be allowed to believe that the fiend who did all the mischief was the printer's ``devil.''
Cardinal Bellarmin tried hard to get his works printed correctly, but without success, and in 1608 he was forced to publish at Ingolstadt a volume entitled Recognitio librorum omnium Roberti Belarmini, in which he printed eighty-eight pages of errata of his Controversies.
Edward Leigh, in his thin folio volume entitled On Religion and Learning, 1656, was forced to add two closely printed leaves of errata.
Sometimes apparent blunders have been intentionally made; thus, to escape the decree of the Inquisition that the words fatum and fata should not be used in <p 80>any work, a certain author printed facta in his book, and added in the errata ``for facta read fata.''