Page:Peter Whiffle (1922).djvu/200

 It is the pleasant custom of present day publishers of books, he was saying, to prelude the real publication of a volume by what is technically known as a dummy. The dummy, the sample from which orders are taken, to all outward inspection, appears to be precisely like the finished book. The covers, the labels, the painted top, and the uncut edges give one every reason to hope for a meaty interior. Once opened, however, the book offers the browser a succession of blank pages. Sheet after sheet of clean white paper slips through his fingers, unless, by some chance, he has opened the volume at the beginning, for the title-page and table of contents are printed (the dedication is missing), and so are the first thirteen pages of the text.

Such dummies are irresistible to me. Coming warm, hot even, from the binder, they palpitate with a suggestion which no perusal of their contents can disturb. How much better than the finished book! I exclaim, and there are days when I feel that I will never write a book; I will write only dummies. I would write a title-page, a table of contents, and thirteen pages of some ghost essay, breaking off in the middle of a curious phrase, leaving the reader sweetly bewildered in this maze of tender thought. And, to give this dummy over-value, to heighten its charm and its mystery, I would add an index to the blank pages, wherein one could learn that on empty page 76 hovered the spirits of Heliogabalus and Gertrude Atherton. It would further inform one