I often hear the word 'dross' banded about these pages as though it were strictly a modern phenomenon

I call a lot of stuff, ancient and modern, 'dross' when it is. I don't 'bandy' the word about.

Entirely unrelated, I'd like to hear kytrad's assessment of John Jacob Niles as a 'collector'.

Also quite unconnnected, Kenny Goldstein had me looking after his correspondence in the weeks before his arrival in the UK in about 1968. He gave me a large bottle of bath oil as recompense. I think that must have been in one of my particularly scruffy hippy phases.