Abū al-Maʿālī Saʿd ibn ʿAlī al-Ḥaẓīrī, often known as Dallāl al-kutub ('the Book Merchant') (fl.
[1]: 251 There he came to establish a bookshop at Bāb Badr in Baghdad's book market, which became such a nodal point in the intellectual life of the city that it became the setting for al-Maqāma al-Baġdādiyya by al-Wahrānī (d. 575/1179); this work speaks of 'the shop of the sheikh Abū l-Maʿālī (…) He is the orchard of erudition, the archive of the Arabs (…) he has a share in every branch of learning'.
To caliph al-Muqtafī he dedicated the work Lumaḥ al-mulaḥ (Sparkles of Witticisms), an anthology focusing on examples of paronomasia from both verse and prose.
Almost entirely lost, too, is his Zīnat al-dahr wa-ʿaṣrat ahl al-ʿaṣr (The Adornment of the Age and the Contemporaries' Very Best), but it is known to have influenced al-Iṣbahānī's Kharīda.
Twenty private epistles, their style also characterised by paronomasia, do survive, along with a number of poems, mostly epigrams (and especially love-epigrams).