Guide to Reading Letter Transcriptions
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| Textual Feature | Appearance |
|---|---|
| passage deleted with a strikethrough mark | |
| passage deleted by overwritten added letters | |
| passage added above the line | passage with added text above |
| passage added on the line | passage with added text inline |
| passage added in the margin | passage with text added in margin |
| handwritten addition to a typewritten letter | typed passage with added handwritten text |
| missing or unreadable text | missing text noted with "[illegible]" |
| uncertain transcriptions | word[?] |
| notes written by someone other than Willa Cather | Note in another's hand |
| printed letterhead text | printed text |
| text printed on postcards, envelopes, etc. | printed text |
| text of date and place stamps | stamped text |
| passage written by Cather on separate enclosure. | written text |
HB HOUGHTON MIFFLIN CO.
DEC 3 1917
BOSTON3 OFFICE 5 Bank street4,
December 1st. My Dear Mr. Scaife1;
The series of pen-and-ink drawings I had in mind, and Mr. Benda's5 fitness to do them, was suggested by a similar set of pen drawings he made to illustrate Jacob Riis6' book, "The Old Town."7 I knew that Macmillans paid him nine hundred dollars for these drawings, which were not used in any periodical, but in the book only. I had planned to have only about a third as many pictures as were in the Riis book.
Mr. Benda telephoned me after your conversation with him. He was very polite and
considerate, as he always is, but he said that Doubleday had paid him $150 and $200
for one or two wash drawings8 to
illustrate novels, and that had he known how little he was to receive for these pen
pictures he would not have felt that he could undertake them. He also said he could
not do the drawings we had blocked out, as they would require a great deal of work
and some of them would have to be done from models. On the other hand, he had
already pent
spent a good deal of time in studying the manuscript, collecting material, and making
preliminary sketches, and he thought perhaps we might be able to substitute a set
of
drawings more conventional and less exacting.
These drawings, however, would have to be done at odd moments of his time, and he could not promise to deliver them before the first of March, as he could not afford to put more remunerative work aside for them. On this point he was very firm.
I am going out to his studio on Monday night, to see what we can do toward planning new compositions, and after that I can write you more fully.
I am cutting the story9 a good deal in revision, and I
can now say positively that it will run very little, if at all, longer than "O Pioneers!"10 I hope you can use the same type as in
that book, and give the sam text pages the same
look. I have broken it up into chapters as much as I can, and liberal page-margins
and spaces at chapter-ends will make the decorations look better. Would your foreman
be willing to let the artist and me size the cuts and in decide on the reduction of the drawings, provided we do not ask for
cuts more than a third of a page in size? If you could give me the exact size of the
page and send me a sheet of the paper you will use, it would be hep helpful.
Benda asked me not to send away the three drawings I already have until we had come to some decision about those
that were or were not to follow. I will send them to you as soon as I have his
permission to do so. Meantime, please let me know whether I may size the cuts. before
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0400.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0400
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, typewritten on recto of each leaf only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Roger L. Scaife1
- Date letter was written
- December 1 [1917]
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Houghton Mifflin Company correspondence and records, 1832-1944 (MSAm1925), Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA
Individual Annotations
5 Bank Street (New York City): The apartment Cather shared with Edith Lewis beginning in 1912, located in Greenwich Village in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Subway construction forced Cather and Lewis to relocate in 1927.
Also called line-and-wash drawing, a technique in which figures are marked out in pen and then tinted with diluted ink or watercolor.
Person Annotations
Scaife, Roger Livingston (1875-1951). Head of publicity at Houghton Mifflin. An 1897 graduate of Harvard University, Scaife went to work for Houghton Mifflin in 1898 as assistant to Azaria Smith, head of the publicity department. Scaife subsequently assumed Smith’s position and became a shareholder of the corporation and secretary of the board of directors. In 1910, when Ferris Greenslet became editor in chief of the trade department, Scaife divided his shares with him, and the two presented themselves to authors as partners, with Scaife handling book advertising and format and Greenslet negotiating contracts and supervising editing. Scaife anonymously published three satirical novels with Houghton Mifflin, The Confessions of a Debutante (1913), Cape Codities (1920), and The Reflections of a T.B.M. (1920), and two books of children’s verse under his own name. Cather corresponded primarily with Greenslet about her novels, but in his absence she dealt with Scaife during the production of My Ántonia (1918), and her dissatisfaction with decisions made on his authority contributed to her decision to transfer her publishing business to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. In 1934 Scaife left Houghton Mifflin to become executive vice president of Little, Brown. He later became the fourth director of Harvard University Press.
Benda, W. T. (1873-1948) ("Wladyslaw Theodor") . Polish-born
American graphic artist. Born in Poland, W.T. Benda studied art
in Krakow and in Vienna, Austria. In 1899, he came to the U.S. to visit his
aunt, actress Helena Modjeska, and worked on her ranch in California until
1902, when he moved to New York City and studied at the Art Students League.
He became well known for his illustrations appearing in both books and
leading magazines, including McClure's during
Cather's editorship there. He was particularly known for his
charcoal-and-wash drawings of exotic beauties known as “Benda women.”
Naturalized as an American citizen in 1911, Benda married Romola Campfield,
with whom he had two daughters, and lived the rest of his life in New York.
Willa Cather chose Benda to illustrate My Ántonia
(1918), and the payment for and number of these illustrations became a
source of conflict with publisher Houghton Mifflin.
Riis, Jacob (1849-1914). Danish-American journalist, photographer,
and social reformer. Born in Ribe, Denmark, Jacob Riis
immigrated to the U.S. in 1870. After several years working menial jobs
throughout the Northeast, Riis was hired as a police reporter by the New York Tribune and would later work for the New York Sun. He is best known for his book How the Other Half Lives (1890), which exposed the
horrifying conditions in which New York tenement-dwellers lived. W.T. Benda
illustrated Riis’s The Old Town (1909), a nostalgic
book about his Danish hometown; Cather refers to these illustrations in her
dispute with Houghton Mifflin about Benda’s illustrations for My Ántonia (1918).
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
The Old Town (1909) by Jacob Riis
My Ántonia (1918) by Willa Cather
O Pioneers! (1913) by Willa Cather
