14 East 94th St.
September 25, 1950
WELL!!!
All I have to say to YOU, Frank Doel,
is we live in depraved, destructive and
degenerate times when a bookshop—a
BOOKSHOP—starts tearing up beautiful old
books to use as wrapping paper. I said to
John Henry when he stepped out of it:
“Whould you believe a thing like that,
Your Eminence?” and he said he wouldn’t.
You tore that book up in the middle of a
major battle and I don’t even know which
war it was.
The Newman arrived almost a week ago
and I’m just beginning to recover. I keep
it on the table with me all day, every
now and then I stop typing and reach over
and touch it. Not because it’s a first
edtion; I just never saw a book so
beautiful. I feel vaguely guilty about
owning it. All that gleaming leather and
gold stamping and beautiful type belongs
in the pine-panelled library of an
English country home; it wants to be read
by the fire in a gentleman’s leather easy
chair—not on a secondhand studio couch in
a one-room hovel in a broken-down
brownstone front.
I want the Q anthology. I’m not sure
how much it was, I lost your last letter.
I think it was about two bucks, I’ll
enclose two singles, if I owe you more
let me know.
Why don’t you wrap it in pages LCXⅡ
and LCXⅢ so I can at least find out who
won the battle and what war it was?
HH
P.S. Have you got Sam Pepys’ diary over
there? I need him for long winter
evenings.
注释：
🤣虽然好多单词不会，但好像也没啥注释好写的了。完了！我变懒了！
