LITTERATEUR AND BOOK-HUNTER
manuscript volumes of Schuylkill Township, Chester County, Pa. I used this material, adding to it, and published, in 1872, The Annals of Phœnixville and Vicinity. Recently Mr. Albert Cook Myers prepared for the Pennsylvania History Club a bibliography of my printed books and papers. They number in all about eighty, and in the course of years I have come to have an extended reputation and a clientele for this kind of production. The Hendrick Pannebecker, given away in the family, on those rare occasions when it is offered for sale brings $25. The Weedon's Orderly Book, published at $5, sells for $10, and the Settlement of Germantown, which was put on the market at $3.50, has produced as high as $74 for a single copy. The publisher buys back every copy he can get and is willing to pay for it $15. Taking all of these books together, however, they have never paid me anything, but they were not written with the expectation of profit and I have had the satisfaction of elucidating by original research some of the interesting characters in the annals of the state. I have made Peter Cornelius Plockhoy and Christopher Dock known over the world. I have clarified and enhanced the reputation of both David Rittenhouse and Anthony Wayne. I have furnished material out of which many subsequent writers have constructed their books. Some years ago Daniel K. Cassel, a well-meaning but illiterate and entirely untrained old man, concluded he would like to write a history of the Mennonites. He came to me and coyly suggested that he would be helped if I should prepare a chapter for him. I told him that I had no time to devote to the task, but that if he found anything serviceable in my published papers I should not interfere with his making use of them. When his book appeared I found, much to my surprise and amusement, that half of it was made up of these papers—text, notes, and citations from authors in other languages which he was unable to read, word for word, as I had written them. One day he came
