14 East 95th St.

New York City

October 15, 1950

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: "Would 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 edition; 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.

WELL!!!

HH

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?

P. S. Have you got Sam Pepys' diary over there? I need him for long winter evenings.