Et Cetera, a Collector's Scrap-Book/Foreword
Foreword
ver a great many years of enthusiastic "collecting," I have filled many scrap books and not a few closets with such excerpts from books and journals, old and new, as have pleased my catholic fancy. The often permanent loss of much that is fine and admirable in literature because its authors, through death, or modesty, or lack of opportunity, have neglected to collect it within covers, always has seemed to me deplorable on a number of counts; and so, entirely for my own pleasure and as a side issue in the larger enterprise of book collecting, I have treasured such lost or forgotten pieces as have come my way until something like chaos in my library has been the result.
For the most part, naturally, my salvaging has concerned itself with the flotsam and jetsam of my larger enthusiasms; but many pleasant tales and poems and sketches by less sonorous reputations also have gone to the making of my literary museum—bits that I have believed worthy of longer and more frequent reading than ordinarily is the fortune of contributions to the periodical press. Hence, in the present selection from my voluminous scrap books, the reader will find strange bookfellows; beside Kipling and Edgar Saltus, Paul Eldridge and Haniel Long; between Hearn and Machen and Dun-sany and Hergesheimer, Henry McCullough and Julian Street; and, cheek by jowl, Stephen Crane and Gustav Meyrink.
Of the first importance, I believe, are such uncollected masterpieces as Middleton's "The District Visitor" and Hearn's "Margarita Pareja," while the uncollected sketches of Stephen Crane and the poems of Dowson, Wilbur Underwood, Lord Dunsany, Saltus, Neil Lyons and Lionel Johnson are items of great attractiveness to the collecting fraternity. Indeed, among the esteemed writers of our day there are few unrepresented by some brief, forgotten bit of prose or verse. The volume is, I believe, quite honestly, what I have endeavored to make it—an authentic "first edition" of half the "collected" men of contemporaneous letters; and in addition it is a fascinating omnium-gatherum for the mere reader who cares no more for a "first" than for a twenty-first edition. Finally, in the words of the jolly old preface-writer whose name in other generations was legion, if lovers of books shall find in this book half the happiness this book-lover put into the making of it—why, then, "I shall not have labored in vain."
Et Cetera