Bibliographic Allusions in Book Titles

LET'S VARY LITERACEE with a little bibliographic burglaree. If you suddenly feel like humming The Pirates of Penzance or recollecting Gilbert and Sullivan, you are closely attuned to the bibliographic thoughts in my mind. Literary allusions are the rich overtones that make reading and writing a grand collaboration and a happy pursuit. An author may conscientiously write to convey ideas, but if a cut above the average, he always strives as did H. L. Mencken to express his ideas ‘in suave and ingratiating terms, and to discharge them with a flourish, and maybe with a phrase of pretty song’. His creative efforts will be mostly wasted, however, if his readers lack the requisite literary background and sophistication that would enable them to join in his game and share his earnest effusions. Literacy is never enough; a young child can read and understand the six one‐syllable words ‘who steals my purse, steals trash’, but that same child can grow to be a mighty old man without ever fully comprehending the sentence unless he reads Othello and studies Iago's presumptuous remarks on ‘Good name in man and woman’.