The Cheapness of a Cheap Edition of ‘The Paston Letters’

Extract

On every wrapper of every volume, Everyman’s Library engages itself to supply its readers, for a few pounds, with a whole bookshelf of the immortals; and for a comparatively small expenditure to make a man intellectually rich for life. This promise is strangely fulfilled in two of its latest volumes—752 and 753. They are thus described on the title-page :

HISTORY.

The; Paston Letters.

Edited by John Fenn and Re-Edited by Mrs. Archer-Hind, M.A.

They are immortal in the same sense that a mutilated mummy is immortal. They will make their readers intellectually rich for life by obliging them to incur the comparatively small expenditure necessary for the purchase of James Gairdner’s edition of the Paston Letters. For there alone, and not here at all, can the average reader hope to form any adequate notion of what the Paston Letters are, and what is their title to immortal fame.

At first sight it appears that, except for a quotation from the Catalogue of the British Museum, Mrs. Archer-Hind ignores James Gairdner and his work altogether. But on closer inspection this proves to be too charitable a supposition. Mrs. Archer-Hind has used Gairdner’s work, but she has misread it superficially and clumsily, and ineptly travestied it.