Langbaine's animadversions on "_crafty Booksellers_" ([A4r]) as well as his attacks on Dryden may have caused an embarrassing bibliographical trick to be played on him. Wood reports that _Momus_ was published in November, 1687, and five hundred copies sold before Langbaine "caused another title to be put to the rest of the copies (with an advertisement against the first)."[25] This new titlepage, added early in December, reads as follows: A New Catalogue of English Plays, Containing All The Comedies, Tragedies, Tragi-Comedies, Operas, Masques, Pastorals, Interludes, Farces, &c. Both Ancient and Modern, that have ever yet been Printed, to this present Year, 1688. To which, are Added, The Volumes, and best Editions; with divers Remarks, of the Originals of most Plays; and the Plagiaries of several Authors. By Gerard Langbaine, Gent.... London, Printed for Nicholas Cox, and are to be Sold by him in Oxford MDCLXXXVIII. Langbaine's reaction to the trick is contained in the Advertisement in which he compares this incident to one played on Oldham and decries "the Heathenish Name of _Momus Triumphans_." I wish I knew my obliging Gossips who nam'd it, that I might thank them, as they deserv'd, for their signal Kindness. I have endeavour'd to be inform'd, who these Friends were, from my Bookseller; but he pleads _Ignoramus_.... Thus not being able to trace it further, and which is worse, _Five Hundred_ Copies being got into _Hucksters Hands_, past my recovery, I am forc'd to sit down with _Patience_, and must depend upon _this Apology_, that my _Friends_ may not think me _Lunatic_ (as they might with reason, were this Title my own) and my _Enemies_ have occasion to say, this just Revenge was inflicted on me by _Apollo_, for abusing his Sons, the Poets. But _whoever_ the _Author_ was, I dare swear, he thought, he had infinitely obliged me, in _dubbing_ me a _Squire_: a Title, no more my due, than _that_ of _Doctor_, is to a _Mountebank_; and which, I receive with the _same_ Kindness, as a _Crooked_ man would _that_ of _My Lord_.[26] Macdonald believes this account is fictive and that Langbaine invented the story to cover an initial immodesty,[27] but Langbaine's style has nothing of the biting playfulness of tone of the spurious title. He is often righteous and sarcastic, but he is not given to direct immodesty or to the burlesque, and _he_ does not consider plagiarism his principal subject. Further, there is evidence in the Preface ([A3r]) that "New _Catalogue_" was at least his working title. Nevertheless, the false title page is a clever and perceptive joke on Langbaine's classical bias and on his fixation with plagiary. His predecessor Kirkman has given an apt contemporary definition of a _momus_: