Once Marco Rubio said, âDonald Trump is a world-class con artist. He conned all these people that signed up for Trump University. Now heâs trying to do the same thing to Republican voters.â Donald Trump responded, âThe real con artist is Senator Marco Rubio who was elected in Florida and who has the worst voting record in the United States Senate.â Fact is, the world has ever been a haven for con artists, which Oxford Dictionaries defines as, âA person who cheats or tricks others by persuading them to believe something that is not true.â
That extends even to librarians, such as Edmund Pearson who graduated from Harvard in 1902 and the Columbia School of Library Service before working for the Washington, D.C. Public Library. Having written a weekly library-tinged newspaper column for 36 years, I noted that Pearson wrote columns for a Boston paper for 14 years. Unlike yours truly, Pearson wasnât above including fabrications. In his second year of columnizing he printed a paragraph he claimed was from an 18th century American librarian. Pearson said it was extracted from âThe Old Librarianâs Almanack, a very rare pamphlet first published in New Haven Connecticut in 1773 and now reprinted for the first time,â The New York Sun swallowed the hoax and reprinted it, as did The Nation, The New York Times, and others.