MISLEADING BOOK TITLES.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLIV, Issue 1180, 1 December 1924, Page 10

MISLEADING BOOK TITLES.

TRAPS FOR THE UNWARY. “Hero’s another book back with a letter of complaint!” growled a bookseller the other day. “ ‘Queens’ Gardens’ again. The woman who ordered it says that she thought it was a book about gardening—not improving essays. That lias happened more times than 1 can remember.” “ituskin,” he continued, “is tho worst offender among the perpetrators of misleading titles. Ruskin seemed to specialise in tliem. The most notorious trap was volume, ‘Notes on tho Construction of Sheepfokls,’ which, far from any technical interest for fanners, is a plea for the reconciliation of Protestants and Papists. Naturalists have ordered ‘The Eagle’s Nest, ’ economists have order ‘Kings Treasuries,’ geoligists have ordered ‘Stones of Venice,’ gardeners order ‘Queens’ Gardens’ and ‘Sesame and Lilies’—only to find that they are treatises on subjects quite other than what they purport to deal with.” Purley’s “Diversions” has “taken in” many people who never expected to find it a very stodgy old book of grammar brightened up with Latin notes. “Irish Bulbs,” by Edgeworth, and “Yeast,” by Charles ■ Kingsley, have fooled many a farmer; and printers have sent postal orders for McEwen’s “On the Types”—only to discover that the work, far from having any technical interest for thorn, is a book of sermons.

At one time there was quite a run on “Urban Bees” by city dwellers who thought they would like to raise their own honey. ’ Sad was their dissillusionment when they found it consisted of a biography of once celebrated Romans who flourished under tho ponlifieat-a of Pope Urban 11., whose family device was a bee. (Jidda's “Moths” has always been, and probably will always be, in steady demand at free libraries among boy naturalists, as is Besant’s “Golden Butterfly.” Stephen Leacock’s “Behind the Beyond” has appeared in the Travel sections of booksellers’ catalogues, and a catalogue ouce gut so confused between Joint Stuart Mill, the philosopher-eco-nomist, and George Eliot’s “Mill oil the Floss” as to contain an entiy:— Mill on Representative Governmen, and ditto on The Floss. “Aggravating Ladies” is another cryptic title. Few people would guess that it was merely Ralph Thomas’s list and description of 150 books of last century, the authorship of which was anonymously attributed merely to “A Lady.” Few book buyers again would guess that “Hobson Jobson” (by Dr. Burnell and Colonel Yule) was the amusing title of a very weighty and effecting title of a very weighty and efficient glossary of Anglo-Indian words and phrases.—John o’ London’s Weekly.