As befits the editor of the Collins Library (best known for reclaiming the notorious English As She Is Spoke), the author favors bookstores and libraries over most other repositories of the past. A visit to Columbia's rare-book room—and the incongruity of looking at daguerreotypes on blond-wood tables under buzzing fluorescent lights—prompts a flight of fancy about the suite of period rooms Collins would build for his ideal library, equipped in this case with a fainting sofa, a damasked ottoman and "the yellow pallor of a gaslight chandelier." While Collins's facts are occasionally unreliable (not Swift's "Modest Proposal" but Defoe's Shortest Way With the Dissenters was the "hoax meant to be so absurd that it would backfire on its erstwhile proponents") the charm of his manner and the originality of his critical intelligence mark this sensitive rendering of Paine's afterlife.