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 |
What a beautiful book4 you sent me yesterday—and what beautiful roses! We will set a new standard of relations between writer and printer. The pains you have taken with this volume and the absolutely satisfying result you have achieved have quite revived my interest in the text. I hope you can do another book for me sometime. I am very fond of this one, I assure you.
I will come to your office Wednesday afternoon a little after four, and you can take me to your place, as I have forgotten your house number.
Please accept my warmest thanks for the flowers, and my heartiest congratulations upon such a fine piece of work as this book.
Cordially yours Willa CatherInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0684.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0684
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Elmer Adler1
- Date letter was written
- [April 8, 1923]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
In #0683, dated March 29, 1923, Cather explains that she is tied up for the upcoming weekend and can't have tea with him. She also says that she has not yet seen April Twilights and Other Poems. Therefore, this letter was likely written the Sunday of the next weekend, which was April 8, 1923.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Elmer Adler Papers (C0262), Princeton University, Firestone Library, Princeton, NJ
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.
Person Annotations
Adler, Elmer (1884-1962). American printer, publisher,
editor, and author. After moving from Rochester, NY, to New York
City, Adler founded the Pynson Printers in 1922. He also became a partner in
Random House in 1922 and founded the Colophon: A Book
Collector’s Quarterly in 1930. Adler’s Pynson press produced deluxe
limited editions of April Twilights and Other Poems
(1923) and December Night (1933) (an excerpt from Death Comes for the Archbishop). He also designed the
edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop illustrated
by Harold von Schmidt (1927), the title page for My Mortal
Enemy (1926) and the title page and dust jacket for Shadows on the Rock (1931). Adler approached Cather
in 1929 about contributing to a planned series in the Colophon on “Getting into Print”; her essay “My First Novels
(there were two)” finally appeared in 1931. In 1940, Adler established the
Department of Graphic Arts at Princeton University, where he remained until
1952. He then moved to Puerto Rico to establish La Casa del Libro, with
which he was associated until his death.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
April Twilights and Other Poems (1923) by Willa Cather
