The New Limerick [antikvár]

AN . EVER . WRITER. TO . A . NEVER . RE ADER. NEWS.u NGENTLE Reader (for I know you well), you have here a new Book, never staled with the plaudits of the press, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar ; nőt sullied with the smoky breath of the multitude. These two thousand seven hun-dred new Limericks, now first published here, have three quarters of them or more never before been printed anywhere or at all. As for the rest, a few hundred poor foundlings have indeed come furtively to light in priváté issues, murky mimeo-graphed or hektographed editions of somé dozen run-ofí sheets, unreadable in smeary purple ink. Wherein Readers have been abused with divers stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors that exposed them. Even these are offered now to your view, cured ancl perfect of their limbs, and all the rest absolute in their numbers as the Unknown Poets conceived them. And believe me this, that when they are gone, and this book out of sale one day, you will scramble for it, and set up a new Inquisition to find you out copies. Take this for a warning, and at the peril of your pleasure's loss ; but thank fortune for the scrape it has made to be now amongst you.Nor is it to be thought that this has been the work of a single hand ; of a single month or year. Decades have been spent two decades and a half tracking the unknown and often over-modest limerick Poets and collectors to their study chambers, and the brewhouses that seem somehow best to excite their ticklish Muse. Libations have been poured out lavishly there, paid for (you may be sure) from the compiler's slender pocketbook over[vü]