hom he made the rather
lame excuse that he had always regarded uncut and sealed books as
tommy-rot, and that he had merely been curious to see how far the thing
could go; and that the result had justified his belief that a book with
nothing in it was just as useful to a book-collector as one embodying a
work of genius. He offered to pay all the bills for the sham Procrustes,
or to replace the blank copies with the real thing, as we might choose.
Of course, after such an insult, the club did not care for the poem. He
was permitted to pay the expense, however, and it was more than hinted
to him that his resignation from the club would be favorably acted upon.
He never sent it in, and, as he went to Europe shortly afterwards, the
affair had time to blow over.

In our first disgust at Baxter's duplicity, most of us cut our copies of
the Procrustes, some of us mailed them to Baxter with cutting notes, and
others threw them into the fire. A few wiser spirits held on to theirs,
and this fact leaking out, it began to dawn upon the minds of the real
collectors among us that the volume was something unique in the way of a
publication.

"Baxter," said our president one evening to a select few of us who
sat around the fireplace, "was wiser than we knew, or than he perhaps
appreciated. His Procrustes, from the collector's point of view, is
entirely logical, and might be considered as the acme of bookmaking. To
the true collector, a book is a work of art, of which the contents
are no more important than the words of an opera. Fine binding is a
desideratum, and, for its cost, that of the Procrustes could not be
improved upon. The paper is above criticism. The true collector loves
wide margins, and the Procrustes, being all margin, merely touches the
vanishing point of the perspective. The smaller the edition, the greater
the collector's eagerness to acquire a copy. There are but six uncut
copies left, I am told, of the Procrustes, and three sealed copies, of
one of which I am the fortunate possessor."

After this deliverance, it is not surprising that, at our next auction,
a sealed copy of Baxter's Procrustes was knocked down, after spirited
bidding, for two hundred and fifty dollars, the highest price ever
brought by a single volume published by the club.

THE HEART OF THE RACE PROBLEM by Quincy Ewing

"And, instead of going to the Congress of the United States and saying
there is no distinction made in Mississippi, beca