In the Track of the Bookworm

by Irving Browne

meaning probably Aristomachus. This mistake is not corrected in the last edition, but the name is omitted altogether

Mr. Beverly Chew “drops into poetry” on the subject, and thus apostrophises the Grangerite:

“Ah, ruthless wight,
Think of the books you’ve turned to waste,
With patient skill.”

r. Henri Pere Du Bois thus describes the ordinary result: “Of one hundred books extended by the insertion of prints which were not made for them, ninety-nine are ruined;

the hundredth book is no longer a book; it is a museum. An imperfect book, built with the spoils of a thousand books; a crazy quilt made of patches out of gowns of queens and scullions.” So Burton compares the Grangerite to Genghis Kahn. Mr. Lang declares the Grangerites are “book ghouls, and brood, like the obscene demons of Arabian superstition, over the fragments of the mighty dead.” I would like to show Mr. Lang how I have treated his “Letters to Dead Authors” and “Old Friends” by illustration. He would probably feel, with Æsop’s lawyer, that “circumstances alter cases,” although he says “no book deserves the honor”

So a reviewer in “The Nation” stigmatises Grangerism as “a vampire art, maiming when it does not murder” (I did not know that vampires “maim” their victims) “and incapable of rising beyond canibalism” (not that they feed on one another, but when critics get excited their metaphors are apt to become mixed)