The elaborate work by Careme, Le Patissier Pittoresque (1842), which contains designs for confectioners, deceived the bookseller from its plates of pavilions, temples, etc., into supposing it to be a book on architecture, and he accordingly placed it under that heading in his catalogue.

Mr. Daydon Jackson gives several instances of false classification in his Guide to the Literature of Botany, and remarks that some authors contrive titles seemingly of set purpose to entrap the unwary.  He instances a fine example in the case of Bishop Alexander Ewing’s Feamainn Earraghaidhiell:  Argyllshire Seaweeds (Glasgow, 1872. 8vo).  To enhance the delusion, the coloured wrapper is ornamented with some of the common marine algae, but the inside of the volume consists solely of pastoral addresses.  Another example will be found in Flowers from the South, from the Hortus Siccus of an p 75Old Collector_.  By W. H. Hyett, F.R.S.  Instead of a popular work on the Mediterranean flora by a scientific man, as might reasonably be expected, this is a volume of translations from the Italian and Latin poets.  It is scarcely fair to blame the compiler of the Bibliotheca Historio-Naturalis for having ranked both these works among scientific treatises.  The English cataloguer who treated as a botanical book Dr. Garnett’s selection from Coventry Patmore’s poems, entitled Florilegium Amantis, could claim less excuse for his blunder than the German had.  These misleading titles are no new invention, and the great bibliographer Haller was deceived into including the title of James Howell’s Dendrologia, or Dodona’s Grove (1640), in his Bibliotheca Botanica.  Professor Otis H. Robinson contributed a very interesting paper on the ``Titles of Books’’ to the Special Report on Public Libraries in the United States of America (1876), in which he deals very fully with this difficulty of misleading titles, and some of his preliminary remarks are very much to the point.  He writes:—­ p 76

``No act of a man’s life requires more practical common sense than the naming of his book.  If he would make a grocer’s sign or an invoice of a cellar of goods or a city directory, he uses no metaphors; his pen does not hesitate for the plainest word.  He must make himself understood by common men.  But if he makes a book the case is different.  It must have the charm of a pleasing title.  If there is nothing new within, the back at least must be novel and taking.  He tortures his imagination for something which will predispose the reader in its favour.  Mr. Parker writes a series of biographical sketches, and calls it Morning Stars of the New World.  Somebody prepares seven religious essays, binds them up in a book, and calls it Seven Stormy Sundays.  Mr. H. T. Tuckerman makes a book of essays on various subjects, and calls it The Optimist; and then devotes several pages