|
Correspondence from Roger C. Staples to Philip Kaplan
3217 Pittsview Road Ann Arbor, Michigan
December 18, 1962
Dear Mr. Kaplan:
Thank you for your kind letter and please excuse my delay in replying to it: everyone in our family was ill. I sincerely appreciate the material you sent me and I promise you that I will use it. May I include your name among those to whom I give acknowledgments in my book?
I have one or two questions to trouble you with. In your description of Hail Mary (Amphora) (Lot #13), you mention that " . . . it was from this copy that the type was set for Crowley's Collected Works . . ." I am curious about which collected works you are referring to—the only collected works that I know was issued in 1905-7, at least 5 years before Hail Mary appeared in 1912. Is there another collected works that I should know about? This has me stumped.
Secondly, I wonder if you would object to my writing to the dealer who bought your collection? I think perhaps I might persuade him to tell me who bought it, or at least to tell me if an institution bought it, in which case (as you mention) it is probably part of the Lilly collection at Indiana. I dislike institutional collections, their "procedures," and the (usually) women who run them! But if you would feel free to give me the name of the dealer whom you sold your collection to, I can promise that I will be very polite to him.
Yorke [Gerald Yorke] also said very much the same thing to me about his appreciation of AC's poetry—he never reads poetry, according to a letter to me. I would be interested to know if he (or Symonds [John Symonds] and Germer [Karl Germer]) are the two literary executors you refer to in your carbon-copy essay. Or are there other hands who I should meet? I hope these questions aren't too difficult—if they are, don't bother with them; you certainly have done more than your share towards helping me.
Please let this letter stand in lieu of a Christmas card—we don't send them (or take Christmas very seriously!)—Yorke is coming to this country next May, and I've invited him to stay with us for a few days, but don't know if he'll accept. Thank you for your invitation to visit: may I surely extend the same to you, when you come to Ann Arbor.
Very gratefully
Roger C. Staples
|