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#1818: Willa Cather to [Harold Mason], July 10, 1922

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ALFRED⬩A⬩KNOPF
INCORPORATED
PUBLISHERS OF BORZOI BOOKS
NEW YORK2 220 WEST FORTY-SECOND STREET⬩TELEPHONE BRYANT 4786⬩CABLES "KNOPF NEW YORK" July 10 1922 Centaur Book Shop3 1224 Chancellor Street Philadelphia, Pennsylvania4 Dear Sirs1,

I will be very glad to look over the matter you have collected for bibliography. Better send a letter in advance, however, as I will be out of town and such material is not easily forwarded. THE BOHEMIAN GIRL5 has never been published in book form but is only obtainable in the issue of McClure's6 I told you of. It will be published in book form a year from this autumn.7

Very cordially yours, Willa Cather

WC.W

Information about this letter:

Source File:
cat.let1818.xml
Letter identifier
1818
Contents
Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
Person to whom letter was written
Harold Mason1
Date letter was written
July 10, 1922
Place letter was written
New York, New York, United States2
Location of original letter
Willa Cather Collected Materials (MS008), University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, Archives & Special Collections, Lincoln, NE

Individual Annotations

The Centaur Book Shop in Philadelphia, PA, was owned by Harold Mason who later also founded the Centaur Press, which published limited edition fine press volumes. David Jester served as Mason's junior partner. The Book Shop itself also functioned as a cultural and literary salon.

"The Bohemian Girl" was not published in book form during Cather's lifetime. However, on 21 April 1922 Ferris Greenslet told Cather that Houghton Mifflin planned to reissue her novel Alexander's Bridge (1912) with "The Bohemian Girl" in the autumn of 1922. The idea was apparently abandoned; the 1922 edition of Alexander's Bridge appeared without the story included.

Person Annotations

0935

Mason, Harold Trump (1893-1983). American bookseller and publisher. Born in Philadelphia, PA, Harold Mason graduated from Germantown Academy in 1911. He and his wife Ann Brakeley Sharps had a daughter, Barrie Gamble Mason. Mason owned the Centaur Bookshop at 1224 Chancellor Street in Philadelphia, PA, which served as a cultural salon where intellectual elites gathered. Mason also developed the Centaur Press out of his shop. He solicited bibliographic information from Cather about her publications in 1922. Mason’s press published limited edition fine press volumes, beginning with Walt Whitman’s “Song of the BroadAxe” in 1924. The press also published Edward McDonald’s A Bibliography of the Writings of D. H. Lawrence (1925).

Place Annotations

New York, New York, United States
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States

Work Annotations

"The Bohemian Girl," McClure's Magazine (August 1912) by Willa Cather

McClure's Magazine

© 2004-2024, Willa Cather Archive. Emily J. Rau, editor. Updated 2023. The Willa Cather Archive is freely distributed by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. UNL Logo