Frankly

Some time ago, I bought a bad reprint of Memories and Milestones by John Jay Chapman. It would not have served the purpose I bought it for, to give as a gift; yet, misprints and all I'm happy to have it around, for many of Chapman's essays are worth rereading. And often the misprints are entertaining, as one in the essay "President Eliot":

As the Prankish tribes in the sixth century submitted to Rome, so the Americans in the nineteenth submitted to Massachusetts.

What sort of pranks did they play?

And the other day in Chateaubriand I encountered the chieftan "Frank Khilperick". Since this was in a digression concerning an Iroquois sachem, I first took the name for a bad rendering of "Frank Kilpatrick". No, it was Chilperic, for whom see The History of the Franks.