For no short while my indebtedness to you has been such as to require
some sort of public acknowledgment, which may now, I think, be
tendered most appropriately by inscribing upon the dedication page of
this small volume the name to which you are daily adding in
significance.

It is a tribute, however trivial, which serves at least to express my
appreciation of your zeal in re-establishing what seemed to the less
optimistic a lost cause. I may to-day confess without much
embarrassment that after fifteen years of foiled endeavors my
(various) publishers and I had virtually decided that the printing of
my books was not likely ever to come under the head of a business
venture, but was more properly describable as a rather costly form of
dissipation. People here and there would praise, but until you,
unsolicited, had volunteered to make me known to the general public,
nobody seemed appreciably moved to purchase.

One by one my books had "fallen dead" with disheartening monotony:
then--through what motive it would savor of ingratitude to
inquire,--you came to remedy all this in the manner of a philanthropic
sorcerer, brandishing everywhither your vivifying wand, and the dead
lived again. At once, they tell me, the patrons of bookstores began to
ask, not only in whispers for the _Jurgen_ which you had everywhere so
glowingly advertised, but with frank curiosity for "some of the
fellow's other books."

Whereon we of course began to "reprint," with, I rejoice to say,
results which have been very generally acceptable. Barring a few
complaints as to the exiguousness of my writing's salacity,--a