Geoffrey Crayon: "The Art of Bookmaking"

You've read the three most renowned stories from Irving's Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon (1819). If you ever wondered about some of the other stories, here's a preview of one in which Irving satirizes the fledgling bookmaking industry and the fears of plagiarizing dead authors:

In one sketch, "The Art of Book Making," Geoffrey Crayon's musings on the "extreme fecundity of the press, and how it comes to pass that so many heads, on which nature seemed to have inflicted the curse of barrenness, should teem with voluminous productions" lead him to conjure a phantasmagoric scene of dispossession and revenge. Having wandered into the reading room of the British Museum library, he discovers "many pale, studious personages, poring intently over dusty volumes, rummaging among mouldy manuscripts, and taking copious notes of their contents." These, he gradually discovers, "were principally authors and in the very act of manufacturing books." But after musing on the ethics of literary borrowing, he falls asleep and dreams that these authors are "a ragged, thread bare throng" of untutored bumpkins, borrowing the "garments" of classic writers in a ridiculous display of "vulgar elegance" (fig. 4). The victims of this literary rapine, a cadre of long-dead authors arrayed in dour portraits on the library walls, then come to life and rise up in a fierce counterrevolution "to claim their rifled property" and chase the plunderers out of the library.

From The Other Panic of 1819