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Correspondence from Gerald Yorke to Philip Kaplan
Forthampton Court Gloucester
31 March 1956
Dear Mr. Kaplan.
Your 25 March. So glad the Montgomery Evans letters survive in the original. I hope you get them for a reasonable price. Amphora, Burns and Oates—it looks as if you have caught me out again in my bibliography: I did not have a copy at the time myself—but have one now. If you have Amphora, privately printed by the authoress for her intimates [sic], look at the epilogue: there is a double acrostic: read down taking the first letter of the first word in each line, then back to the first line and the first letter of the last word in each line, and you will get a good laugh. The Burns and Oates edition (a later one) was withdrawn when this was pointed out to them, even though their edition did not include this epilogue.
MS poem at the end of Baudelaire [Charles Baudelaire] [Little Poems in Prose]. Is it in A.C.'s hand? I have never been quite sure whether these epilogue poems were by him under different pseudonyms or not.
If you have a copy of Putnam's 'Paris was our mistress', please copy out the reference to Crowley in it for me.
I don't know Yeats' 'Mosada'. The only reference by him to A.C. that I know of occur in his letters edited by Wade.
The panels by Mrs Mathers [Moina Mathers] (Soror Vestigia Nulla Retorsum) are dull. Four flat orthodox paintings of Egyptian gods—no imagination, dull colours, and no background. They were props for her husbands [MacGregor Mathers] Isis cult, which had a short life. Later they hung in the anteroom to the G.D. [Golden Dawn] Temple in Mathers' house. I refused to buy them for £20: £100 is now being asked for them—I did not think them worth £20.
A.C.'s art. Karl Germer has a full set of photographs of the pictures shown by A.C. in New York. I have only a few duplicates of them. If you write him mentioning my name and that you know Jacobs [Samuel Jacobs], he will almost certainly loan them to you to copy—but he is in the process of moving house and it may be some time before he can unpack them. Am not selling anything myself.
I will copy out the references to Jacobs in A.C.'s diaries, send them to you and him with a request that he write me out his account of the episode.—cannot do this before June. Meanwhile do please get copies for me of his letters from A.C.
Many thanks in advance for Arts and Decoration with John's [Augustus John] portrait of A.C. The latter reproduced it as an illustration in the large paper edition of The Equinox, I forget in which number.
I was a director of the Mandrake Press just before it went bankrupt. I inherited nothing from A.C.—except his magic wand—, but have been collecting him since 1928, and have an Abramelin talisman on the job. I helped his executors sort his papers, and copied anything I had not got. If Germer or I get anything new to the other we send each other a typescript copy. Hence the vast bulk of my typescripts. Then I would pay during A.C.'s lifetime to have typescripts copied for him, in return keeping either his MS or else his corrected typescript. Everything else I have bought or had given to me before the prices went up.
No hurry about returning the duplicate copy of my catalogue. Let me have it back some time in June. I am with my children in the country for their Easter holidays (a month) then I go to Italy and Sicily for three weeks. Shall therefore be away from my books till then, when I will work out the list of your wants, and keep my eyes open for you.
Do in time please unearth your copies of the Fatherland, and let me know of any items by A.C. in it and not listed in my catalogue of magazine articles U.S.A. A.C. had not a complete set himself, and so I am fairly certain that there are more Fatherland articles by him than in my list.
Will send you on loan to photostat the catalogue of A.C.'s exhibition at the Sforza gallery in Berlin on my return to London.
Will check up 82 (of which you have a dozen copies) on my return to London.
Yours
Gerald Yorke
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