Mark Twain

“ There is no one whom people wish out of the way more than some well-meaning person who insists upon formally making them acquainted with a company of old friends, and is so full of his own performance that he won't see they are on hand-shaking terms already, and all they want is a chance to get at one another. Now if there is any one class of their authors whom the American people do know rather better than any other, it is the American humorists, from Washington Irving to Bill Nye, and we are not going to repeat their names here, or lecture upon their qualities. ”

“ We meant to put in everybody's favorite author, but the limits of the Library would not allow of this; and we had to be content with the hope that no one would finally remember their absence except the favorites themselves. To these we would say, in the intimacy of a public advertisement, that they may confidently look to find themselves in a future work. They are no worse than many, perhaps most, of the authors here represented; in making this compilation, we have exercised, not only the disorder of chaos, but the blindness of fate.
Our work is not, however, a last judgment ”

“ For example, the reader accustomed to the cheap artifices of other editors will be surprised to meet, first, a selection from the chief compiler's own work, which he would naturally have expected to find in the small print of an appendix ”