Page:On the Difficulty of Correct Description of Books - De Morgan (1902).djvu/28

 understood place, as at the end of the preface, where the author should mark the last date at which any matter was added to the work, not including the verbal alterations which take place in correcting the press.

[16] Fourthly, it is becoming common to publish books without a date, whenever they are of a species which rapidly grows old, as in the case of atlases, and of popular astronomical books.

All these things are objectionable, and will certainly cause confusion. The accurate date of any book, no matter how obscure in its own day and in that which follows, may become of importance at a still later epoch.

But though title pages have frequently made erroneous announcements, still more frequently have their contents been misrepresented; in no particular more frequently than as to the name of the author. There is a loose system of description, under which any prominent proper name is taken for that of the author. If the modesty of a commentator should lead him to print his own name in smaller capitals than that of his original, it is very possible that his comment may be entered as the original work. If a friend or patron should contribute a preface, he will perhaps get credit for the whole; thus Billingsley's English Euclid has been entered under the works of John Dee, who wrote the introduction. The inventor of logarithms has before now figured as the author of the Bloody Almanac, which to an unattentive title reader is "by the noble Napier." The reason is that John Booker, the real author, announces his work to contain an "Abstract of the prophecies by the noble Napier." The Latin forms of names do their parts we remember to have noted some confusion between the contemporaries, Francis Patrizi and Francis Barozzi, arising out of their descriptions as Franciscus Patricius and Franciscus Barocius Patricius Venetus. Must a librarian set down J. Ralphson, F. R. S.,