{"id":88793,"date":"2015-08-13T14:36:32","date_gmt":"2015-08-13T18:36:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=88793"},"modified":"2015-08-13T18:18:18","modified_gmt":"2015-08-13T22:18:18","slug":"letters-of-note","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/08\/13\/letters-of-note\/","title":{"rendered":"Letters of Note"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Thomas_Rowlandson_-_A_Book_Auction\"<\/a>

Thomas Rowlandson, A Book Auction<\/i>, 1810-15.<\/p><\/div>\n

In his late twenties, my father was a habitu\u00e9 of the Charles Hamilton Autograph Auctions at New York\u2019s Waldorf Astoria, where he would snap up anything that went unsold at the end of the day; in this way he earned the nickname The Vulture. Charles Hamilton himself was a noted signatures expert who had given testimony in a number of prominent forgery cases. His auctions were known for their quality and their miscellany, and for the personality of their proprietor. \u2018\u2018Unless you have a soul made of solid lead,\u2019\u2019 he purportedly said<\/a>, \u2018\u2018your pulse quickens and your eyes brighten when you look upon something that a great man actually held and into which he put his personal thoughts.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

My father, due to his own somewhat indiscriminate buying practices, ended up with a somewhat unfocused collection of bargains. He had some good pieces of ephemera\u2014two tickets to Andrew Johnson\u2019s impeachment, a dinner invitation from Thomas Jefferson\u2014but he also had a single strand of John Keats\u2019s hair. And then there were the ones that got away. There was that time Hamilton auctioned off Harry Truman\u2019s World War I diaries, and the asking price was a bit high, and no one was allowed to inspect them before bidding, \u201cand they might have been incredibly boring,\u201d but still \u2026 <\/p>\n

These, however, were nothing to the Hitler originals. A number of Adolf Hitler\u2019s student-era landscapes went on the block one rainy evening in the late seventies. \u201cThey weren\u2019t bad,\u201d my dad would say. There was almost no one bidding. \u201cAnd imagine what a litmus test! \u2018Would you like to come up and see my Hitlers \u2026 ?\u2019 Any woman who wasn\u2019t interested could be disqualified right there!\u201d And yet, they were more than he could afford, he decided. He\u2019s regretted it ever since. The lost Hitler originals became real in our house, more real than any of the boxes of framed letters and carefully packaged scraps of ephemera kept in the attic cedar closet.<\/p>\n

For every Christmas and birthday, I received a piece of the collection: a letter signed by Eleanor Roosevelt, a draft of a Marianne Moore poem, a thank-you note from Helen Keller.<\/p>\n

One of my favorite gifts was a typed letter on celadon green American Mercury letterhead. It reads:<\/p>\n

\n

January 13, 1925<\/p>\n

Dear Miss Warner,<\/p>\n

I am sorry to say your request seems to me to be rather foolish. I can\u2019t imagine writing anything that would be of any direct value to contributors to the Midland magazine. It seems to me that they are already doing excellent work. If they want to do better my advice to them is that they read fewer magazines and more books, keep out of the society of bad authors and above all avoid going to literary dinners.<\/p>\n

Yours sincerely,
H. L. Mencken, Editor<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is the best advice I\u2019ve ever been given. I\u2019d rather have it than a Hitler original.<\/p>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review, and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his late twenties, my father was a habitu\u00e9 of the Charles Hamilton Autograph Auctions at New York\u2019s Waldorf Astoria, where he would snap up anything that went unsold at the end of the day; in this way he earned the nickname The Vulture. Charles Hamilton himself was a noted signatures expert who had given […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[19147,14660,19145,19146,8892,5733,14918,9275,4948,2391,6749,182,2292],"class_list":["post-88793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-andrew-johnson","tag-auctions","tag-charles-hamilton","tag-charles-hamilton-autograph-auctions","tag-childhood","tag-correspondence-2","tag-family-life","tag-h-l-mencken","tag-harry-truman","tag-hitler","tag-john-keats","tag-letters","tag-thomas-jefferson"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Letter from H. L. 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