Oh my,

I do bless you for that Walton's Lives. It's incredible that a book published in 1840 can be in such perfect condition more than a hundred years later. Such beautiful, mellow roughcut pages they are, I do feel for poor William T. Gordon who wrote his name in it in 1841, what a crummy lot of descendants he must have-to sell it to you casually for nothing. Boy, I'd like to have run barefoot through THEIR library before they sold it.

Now listen, I'm enclosing a $5 bill, that Lives makes me very dissatisfied with my Angler which I bought before I met you. It's one of those hard-faced American Classics-for-the-Masses editions, Izaak just hates it, he says he's not going around looking like THAT for the rest of my life, so use the extra $2.50 for a nice English Angler, please.

Fascinating book to read, did you know John Donne eloped with the boss's highborn daughter and landed in the Tower for it and starved and starved and THEN got religion, my word.

hh

You better watch out. I'm coming over there in 53 if Ellery is renewed. I'm gonna climb up that Victorian book-ladder and disturb the dust on the top shelves and everybody's decorum. Or didn't I ever tell you I write arty murders for Ellery Queen on television? All my scripts have artistic backgrounds-ballet, concert hall, opera-and all the suspects and corpses are cultured. Maybe I'll do one about the rare book business in your honor, you want to be the murderer or the corpse?