When McClurg’s book-store was gutted by a fire some years ago, in which the precious contents of the Saints’ and Sinners’ Corner were ruined beyond restoration and the many associations that lingered around them went up in smoke or were drowned out by water, the newspapers were filled with all manner of stories about the Saints’ and Sinners’ Club that had held its meetings there.  The Rev. Dr. Gunsaulus, one of the most widely known Saints, spoke of it as an association “without rules of order or times of meeting.”  “It consisted,” said he, in a published interview, “of the most interesting group of liars ever assembled.  For ten years that Saints’ and Sinners’ Corner was a place where congenial fellows met.  We simply feasted our eyes on beautiful books or old manuscripts and chatted with each other after the usual fashion of book-lovers.  The stories told were sometimes more amusing than profitable.”  He also told how Field, on one occasion, saved a book which he greatly coveted by writing on the fly-leaf: 

  Swete friend, for Jesus’s sake forbeare
    To buy ye lake thou findest here,
  For that when I do get ye pelf,
    I meane to buy ye boke my selfe.

  Eugene Field._

But the clergymen, doctors and merchants, actors and newspaper-men who met by chance and the one common instinct of book-loving at McClurg’s, albeit “the greatest aggregation of liars” one of them had ever “met up with,” were a simple, ingenuous, and aimless lot compared to the group which Field assembled in his corner in the “Sharps and Flats” column.  Only quotations from some of his reports of their imaginary meetings can do justice to these children of his brain.  These I should preface with the explanation that Field always sought to preserve in his fiction some general and distinguishing characteristics of his Saints and Sinners, who were all real persons bearing their real names.  His many inventions stopped at bestowing fictitious names upon either his Saints or his Sinners.  I have selected “corners” which have not been published between boards.  It is, perhaps, needless to say that I am always made to figure as a Philistine in these gatherings, as a penalty for my lack of sympathy with the whole theory of valuing books by their dates, editions, and bindings rather than their “eternal internals.”

  SOUVENIRS FROM EGYPT

At a meeting of the bibliomaniacs in the Saints and Sinners Corner yesterday, Mr. E.G.  Mason announced that he was about to start for Africa.  It was his intention to leave Chicago on the morrow, and sail from New York on Saturday.

  Mr. G.M.  Millard:  “Do you go in the interests of the Newberry
  Library, or as the agent of Mr. Charles F. Gunther?”

Mr. Mason:  “I go for pleasure, but during my absence I shall cast around now and then for relics which I know my good friend, Mr. Poole, desires to possess.  For example, I am informed that the Newberry Library is in need of a stock of papyrus, and if I can secure a mummy or two I shall certainly do so.  Indeed, I hope to bring back a valise full of relics.”

  The Rev. Mr. Bristol:  “Maybe the gentleman would like to borrow a
  trunk?”