A little while back I ordered some genealogy titles from the every-so-often
used-book sale of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. They arrived
yesterday. One of them was a copy of The Complete Peerage volume 13 (1940), the
one covering peerages created between 1900 and 1938. According to the brief
history of CP in volume 14, this volume was published out of order, between
volumes 9 (1936) and 10 (1945), possibly in hope of boosting the precarious
finances of the CP project. And of course when it finally came time to finish
the series, the pre-existence of volume 13 was why the final two volumes had to
be numbered 12-part-1 and 12-part-2.

I had mostly ordered CP13 for its curiosity value; my interest in 20th century
peers is, to put it mildly, minimal. But I was fascinated to find that it
arrived with a sales receipt pasted into its frontmatter, showing that had been
purchased on May 7, 1946, from B. F. Stevens & Brown, Ltd., Library and Fine
Art Agents, of New Ruskin House, Little Russell Street, London, for 3/ 13s 6d,
by John S. Wurts of Germantown, Pennsylvania. John S. Wurts? That name sounded
familiar.

Oh, _that_ John S. Wurts. G. E. McCracken, writing in The American Genealogist
in 1976 ("Towards an Index Expurgatorius", volume 52, page 182), included him
on a seven-person list of "genealogical authors whose works are so untrustworthy
that they deserve general condemnation." Some of the individuals on McCracken's
list were out-and-out deliberate fraudsters such as Horatio Gates Somerby and
Gustave Anjou, but a cursory look at a few of Wurts' books on archive.org
suggests that his failings were more those of enthusiasm unfettered by
judgement. One volume of his multi-book series about the genealogy of Magna
Carta sureties includes section headers such as "our uncle Julius Caesar."

Anyway, no great point to any of this, except that it's a small and
interconnected world, which of course genealogists know already.

--
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
pnh@panix.com
http://nielsenhayden.com/genealogy-tng