Monthly Letters and Sandglasses missing/desired

I've added the Sandglass for a 1938 Heritage Club original, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, illustrated by Gordon Grant. He was commissioned to produce pictures that conveyed the poem's "manly and robust" qualities, which in George Macy's view no existing illustrator had managed to do. The Sandglass enthuses about the line drawings and full page colour paintings which Grant produced, BUT...
...as Django explained last year (message 28 in the when is HP > LEC? thread) Macy had actually found the paintings both poorly reproduced and marred by a "large quantity of corniness" and a "slick magazine atmosphere". He probably particularly had in mind the relish with which Grant responded to the stanza:
"Her lips were red, her looks were free,
"Her locks were yellow as gold:
"Her skin was as white as leprosy,
"The Night-mare Life-in-Death was she,
"Who thicks man's blood with cold."
The resultant wild-eyed naked floozy must have knocked more than one subscriber back on their heels, but she's certainly memorable!
I like the book, with its elegant binding, vivid pictures, and 18pt Bell type; certainly more than I like the Folio Society's recent over-decorated LEC of the Rime. But I can see it wouldn't be to everyone's taste!

featherwate, do you have this volume? I've never seen it and now you have my appetite whetted! Could you provide photos?

Django I have added a selection here:

3) I happen to like the illustrations, myself.

>3 featherwate:

Thanks, featherwate! I like them, though I think they really are wrong. Still, Life-in-Death is, to use a technical term, "hawt."

5 >
Yes, much as I enjoy them they are wrong really. Tho' the whirlpool one is effective and the quieter pictures of the ship in sail are good - Macy had a gift for spotting artists with a working knowledge of boats. Pity he never got round to commissioning an edition of Sailing Alone.

Thank you for enlarging my vocabulary! I had to look up hawt and am now waiting for the right opportunity (and company) for dropping it into the conversation.

With one clear exception (no prizes for guessing which) I rather like these - and I like the book design too and especially the rear board. Although I'm not E.A. Wilson's biggest fan I was impressed with the only 'in the flesh' copy of the LEC ROTAM I've seen, but my favourite edition of the work remains the 1994 FS edition, with the darkest of illustrations by Garrick Palmer, printed on pale blue paper and bound in a maroon 'full silk'. If only the press work and reproduction of the engravings were up to LEC standards I feel that this would have been a real classic.

I've added the Sandglass for a 1969 reprint of a 1941 Heritage Club original, Aesop's Fables: A New Version. Macy commissioned a writer and illustrator pair, Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson, who five years before had produced The Story of Ferdinand, a hugely popular children's story - still in print today.
The 1969 reprint is a Norwalk, Ct. edition but I bought it in preference to the 1941 original because (a) it was cheaper! (though not by much) and (b) I preferred its binding - a bright cheerful yellow with a sepia drawing by Lawson. Lawson is the main reason I have the book: he's a wonderfully skilled and witty draughtsman.
The Sandglass for this 1969 edition differs in some respects from that for the original (No. 11D April 1941). The short history of western printing with which it opens fortunately replaces a longer description of Aesop himself. 'Fortunately' because the description dwells over-much on Aesop's physical appearance.
I've posted a few pictures at

8) Intriguing! I'll have to add that to my Heritage Press Exclusives!

>8 featherwate:

Wonderful illustrations! I have to say I prefer them to the ones in the MUCH pricier LEC designed by Bruce Rogers.

I've added the Monthly Letter for Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1953). The volume itself is an attractive one, and has two heavyweight names attached to it: firstly, Carl Purington Rollins, one of the great American printers and book designers, whose other LECs include the attractive but overlooked 1930 Snow-Bound and the highly-regarded (to judge from current asking prices) 1939 Tom Sawyer illustrated by Thomas Hart Benton; and secondly, LEC favourite Lynd Ward, whom George Macy subsidized for the six months it took Ward to produce 48 Arthurian colour lithographs. They lack the bravura of his illustrations for The Innocent Voyage, but quite rightly so: their delicacy and muted palette give them a dream-like quality that is perfect for Tennyson's epic poem - and delicacy and soft colours don't prevent Ward from producing some startlingly powerful compositions where appropriate.
From which you may gather I like this book!

Anyone have the Monthly Letter and maybe announcement card to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle?

>12 ironjaw: I do. I'll try and scan and post them sometime soon.

Ken, thank you so much!!!!

I've written a guide to how to link documents to LT comment section using Google Drive. It's quite handy for those letters: PDF

See my listing for The Jungle for inspiration.

Just updated the link to the PDF above as it required sign in. It's now available to browse without signing in to google.

Thanks Faisel, useful information. I just signed up for my free 5 GB.

Now that the new year is upon us, I am hoping we can make a major push as a group of Devotees to expand the Dropbox folder with missing Monthly Letters (and when available, Publication Announcement cards). It would be great if we could create a complete database of these valuable documents as a reference for other members and ourselves. Since many times the books come without the original club literature, and certain unscrupulous sellers have decided to profit by selling the literature separate from the book, this a great way to share with each other so everyone has a more complete collection.

Personally, I own 120 titles with at least a Monthly Letter (I have not noted in my book database which titles also have a Publication Announcement). But I also own another 51 Limited Edition Club titles without any Monthly Letter and for which there is currently no Dropbox copy. What I have not yet done is compare my 120 to those currently available on Dropbox to see exactly how many I can contribute over the coming weeks.

I realize some people (such as myself) do not have scanners, but surely we all own cameras and could take clear and readable pictures of our club literature in a large enough size that other members can read it. It would also be helpful if we could follow a standard naming convention on Dropbox so it is easy to scan through and see what is available and what is missing. Building off the files that already exist, we should probably just continue creating a folder for each title, and naming it as: Year Book Title (Author), the author only really being needed if there are multiple authors with the same title (though the year of publication should also enable us to distinguish). The image files, as we've discovered, don't really need to be named provided they are filed under the proper Year-Title folder.

Since the earlier publications are probably more rarely found with club literature, I will start my wish list with my earliest 11 books without Monthly Letters. Can anyone post these to Dropbox?

More importantly, is there broader support beyond myself for this project? If so, please submit your requests and we'll see who has what.

Thanks in advance.

My initial wish list is:

1930 - The Decameron
1930 - Undine
1931 - Tom Jones
1932 - Droll Stories
1932 - South Wind
1932 - The Jaunts and Jollities of Mr. John Jorrocks
1934 - The Travels of Marco Polo
1936 - Gargantua & Pantagruel
1937 - The Life of Benvenuto Cellini
1939 - Troilus & Cressida
1940 - Ivanhoe

>18 UK_History_Fan:

A worthwhile project for Devotees of this group. I have the following available from your list:

1930 - The Decameron
1930 - Undine
1932 - Droll Stories
1932 - South Wind
1932 - The Jaunts and Jollities of Mr. John Jorrocks
1934 - The Travels of Marco Polo
1937 - The Life of Benvenuto Cellini
1939 - Troilus & Cressida
1940 - Ivanhoe

I bear in mind that other members have stated that these items should be available to those who have been invited to join the George Macy Devotees Dropbox, and as I am not sure how to upload them to this Dropbox (I seem to have acquired a few Dropbox accounts, none of which I'm adept at using), I would like to e-mail the following .jpg files to a knowledgeable administrator. (Faisel seems to be very accomplished in this regard, but perhaps there are others?)

>Sean this sounds great! I am very enthusiastic about this idea about expanding the current list. I do believe, as you also suggest, that we should stay with the "year" convention as it is right now than say renaming the list by authors.

I'm also slowly integrating these monthly letters to my LT account - as in linking them to the individual LEC title as explained in the PDF guide in #15 above.

Another question I am finding a bit difficult to decide on is how much to lay weight on going after LEC titles with monthly letters? I mean if you find a title on your wish list for a good price compared to an elevated price with the letter, which one would you choose. Or is the book condition priority number one, and letters secondary? What are peoples choices?

At present I have uploaded everything I have, and will happily continue to contribute whenever I stumble upon something.

>20 ironjaw:

For me, condition is always pre-eminent. That doesn't mean I haven't bought copies in less-than-fine condition when it is a title I want and it's priced attractively. I had the opportunity several years ago to buy one of two copies of Far Away and Long Ago: one was in Near Fine/Fine condition minus glassine Monthly Letters and boxed slipcase, and the other was Fine withglassine, Monthly Letters and boxed slipcase. For a $400 difference in price, I chose the one without the extras. Still, if my lottery numbers ever come up....

> 19
Robert, since I am suggesting we put some focus this year on expanding the collection, feel free to email me any .jpg files and I will be happy to get them to Dropbox (I will PM you my email). It really is a simple process, though in all honesty, I cannot even remember who "owns" the Dropbox group folder and must invite new members. But someone was kind enough to provide me access quite a number of months ago, and I use it regularly. Now that I have access, I wonder if I am able to "invite" new members? We should try it at some point.

> 20
Faisel, this is always my dilemma. Obviously, I would not choose a copy without the Monthly Letter all other factors being equal, but it is usually a choice of settling for some less than ideal combination (my version of the ideal being fine condition book with fine condition slipcase, any dust wrappers or glassine as originally issued also in fine condition, with Monthly Letter and Publication Announcement at a fair and reasonable price). Since I almost never find my ideal, I usually have to trade off various features. I will not buy without a slipcase (or at least I have not to date) despite the fact that many people suggest these can be made somewhat easily. I personally have no interest in slipcase construction, nor would I pay $30 or more for someone else to customize one. I prefer to take things as originally issued from the publisher even if that means sacrificing quality. Many of my titles are housed in battered, beaten, torn, split, faded, scratched, and otherwise undesirable slipcases, but at least they are the originals. I am far less forgiving on book condition. I particularly try to avoid damaged spines (sun darkened, sun faded, chipped leather, frayed cloth, etc.), but this is becoming more cost prohibitive in the older titles even when copies are available. If it is a more rare title or in exceptionally good condition or at a very attractive price, I will dispense with holding out for a copy with the Monthly Letter. Clearly, from my statistics you can see between 1/4 and 1/3 of my collection is currently sans Letter.

To be honest, one of the advantages to us collectors of building up a comprehensive Monthly Letter database is it will allow us to shop with more freedom. While I will always prefer ownership over some photocopy or digital existence, if I know the Monthly Letter is at least accessible via Dropbox, then I am much less hesitant to acquire a copy of the book without one.

>20 ironjaw: I'm interested in the content of the monthly letters and appreciate that they do give an added dimension to any given book: however, I give very little significance to having them as physical entities. If I can read the content from one of the letters that a member of this group has very kindly donated to the Dropbox project then I'm quite content. The book itself is everything to me and I would pay very little premium to obtain a copy with newsletter. This quite probably stems from the fact that, living in the UK, beggars can't be choosers when it comes to collecting LECs as they are so rare and one seldom has a choice of copies.

>23 UK_History_Fan: Sean - Faisel owns the project.

>24 HuxleyTheCat:
Well then thanks again to Faisel for getting this site up and running and this project started. Hopefully we are not jeopardizing your space limitations with any proposed expansion.

Not all Sean, we're at 60% of the 10.2GB I have at the account. Of course it helps with new users signing up to dropbox referring me so that I can receive some more space.

> 24
when it comes to collecting LECs as they are so rare and one seldom has a choice of copies.
Sadly true, though not I suppose surprising. On Abe at present there are about 765 LECs with monthly letters on sale worldwide. As one might expect, the majority of these – about 740 - are on offer from within the USA, as are about half a dozen monthly letters being sold in their own right.
Of the remaining 20 or so copies, only 11 are on offer from within the UK (four of them from the same bookseller) - this out of a total of fewer than 350 LECs available in all) There are also three from Canada and three from Ireland. Where in the world the other six or so copies are I have no idea !
These are obviously not exact figures (some of the books involved may be being offered by more than one bookseller, and there may, of course, be some available from dealers who are not represented on Abe), but it certainly confirms that if you don't live in the USA your chances of running across an LEC-with-Letter locally are pretty remote.

NEW MONTHLY LETTERS ALERT:

Thanks to generosity of Robert (Django6924), we now have for our reading pleasure at the LEC Dropbox shared folder the following new additions to our collection:

1930 - The Decameron
1932 - Droll Stories
1932 - The Jaunts and Jollities of Mr. John Jorrocks
1934 - The Travels of Marco Polo
1939 - Troilus & Cressida
1940 - Ivanhoe

Monthly Letters for additional titles should be posted in the next few days and I will alert the group once this is complete.

A big thank you to Robert!

Marco Polo and Ivanhoe - great! Thank you Robert.

20> I too go for condition first but I'll pay an extra $5-10 for the monthly letter. I'll pay up to an extra $20 for a good slipcase since I can make a better one for that price. I've found it harder to find the early volumes in decent slipcases and/or Monthly Letters. Luckily the first fifty monthly letters were published separately in 1987.

> 30
Someone clearly missed an opportunity. They should have bound and published all the Monthly Letters. With the prices that the Bibliography and the Quarto-Millenary command, they could have made a fortune.

> 31
They'd certainly cost you a tidy sum: here are the first 77 letters, currently for sale on Abe:
Book Description: Limited Editions Club New York. Hardcover. Book Condition: Fine. Rare Limited Editions Club ephemera - the first 77 Monthly Letters. Six bound harback volumes. From its beginning each LEC book was advanced by a four-page Monthly Letter with information about the author, title, illustrator, book design and production process. In the early years a subscriber could return a series of 12 to the LEC and pay for binding them. These six volumes contain the original early letters for the first six years. Four monthly letters, numbers 1-4, were sent prior to the first publication; these are laid into the first volume. Bound in black cloth covered boards with Limited Editions Club logo stamped on cover. In fine condition.
$850 for 77 letters...I don't know how many LECs there finally were (or have been to date) but at $11 a letter the first 500 would cost you $5,500.00.
Plus postage, of course.

I've added the Monthly Letter and an announcement card (if that's the right description) for 1963's Peter Ibbetson written and illustrated by George du Maurier. The book was designed by George Salter, his sixth Macy commission. It's an attractive volume inside and out, and du Maurier's pen-and-ink drawings (85 of them apparently) are impressively clear and effective, not least because of the page size: 8.5" x 11".
It's not a book I can ever remember reading, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed the story will live up to its surroundings!

I wouldn't cough up that kind of money. I have the Quarto-Millenary and the Monthly Letters 1929-1933 only missing the Bibliography.

I agree Dropbox is a godsend, I've decided not to be bothered too much about whether a LEC book contains a monthly letter or not since I've linked the letters and announcement cards to LT, it doesn't matter anymore. I would still prefer that members here try to upload PDF files if they can. The integration is much better.

>33 featherwate: Featherwate, thanks for Peter Ibbetson, I've just bought this book.

>33 featherwate:, 34

Peter Ibbetson was a profoundly moving read for me--though I read it as a teenager, and haven't had time to reread it since. Sometime in my 20s I saw the 1930s film version starring Gary Cooper and was similarly affected. I need to go back and see if the magic is still there.

>34 ironjaw:
thanks for Peter Ibbetson, I've just bought this book
I like a nice coincidence, ironjaw! (what my Dublin grandmother called a happystance)
>35 Django6924:
That's promising. It sounds as if I have something to look forward to.

> 33
Thanks for uploading the Peter Ibbetson. I own this but am not familiar with it at all.

Robert has forwarded me some additional Monthly Letters. Uploaded tonight:

1930 - Undine
1932 - South Wind
1937 - Life of Cellini

Thanks Robert!

>35 Django6924: Robert, I should check out that film. Thanks!

>38 ironjaw:

I think you will like it--the director, Henry Hathaway, directed several of John Wayne's films later in his career, including True Grit, and was basically considered an action/Western director, but he was born "Marquis Henri Léopold de Fiennes," the son of a Belgian aristocrat, and in the 1930s was really on his game. His versatility is shown by the fact that in 1935 in addition to Peter Ibbetson, he directed one of the best Hollywood movies of the decade, as well as a personal favorite of mine, Lives of a Bengal Lancer.

So Gary Cooper was not only an LEC subscriber, he also starred in the Hollywood versions of five LEC books, viz.
The Virginian
Peter Ibbetson
For Whom the Bell Tolls
A Farewell to Arms
The Adventures of Marco Polo
Clearly a man of impeccable taste! Of course I wouldn't dream of suggesting this might be due to his having two English parents and spending three years at an English grammar school (about an hour's drive from where I live)...:)

On a less frivolous note, I've only just realised that he died a few days after his 60th birthday.

>40 featherwate:

featherwate, he did star in the first version of A Farewell to Arms, but that was regrettably never an LEC (an oversight a revived LEC should correct!). But he was an uncredited extra in the silent Ben-Hur, which keeps his LEC total at 5.

Thanks for the correction, Django - I'm not sure why I was convinced the LEC had done Farewell. Wishful thinking, probably!

I've experienced that as well! I think A Farewell to Arms would have been a spectacular LEC, and it has always been my favorite Hemingway novel.

I received something new (for me) with my latest LEC purchase: along with the Monthly Letter and Announcement was the bill (attached to the announcement). $22.50 new for Up From Slavery in 1970 - hasn't appreciated much since I picked it up for $30 in mint condition.

According to the Westegg inflation calculator, $22.50 in 1970 dollars is something like $128 today. So it looks like you got quite the deal.

>44 kdweber:

Nice book, too! I had the Heritage Press edition, but a few years ago an unread LEC of it was advertised on eBay, and I bid a ridiculously low figure (about $30 as I remember) and won it. No ML or Announcement card, so you did get a bargain!

On the other hand, my LEC The Grapes of Wrath came with the original bill for only $10, but I paid $1000 for it....

I've uploaded the Monthly Letter No 170 previewing the publication Tales of the Gold Rush, a selection of stories by Bret Harte. “Hoped for” publication I should have said, because this is summer 1944 and the programme for the Fifteenth Series is in some disarray. Already the subscribers have been warned that July's book will be Wendell Willkie's One World, a substitution for one of several Prospectus books whose production has fallen behind schedule. Indeed, Harte's Tales is itself another such substitution: one of two “books-in-progress” that the LEC board had prudently included in the prospectus against the possible exigencies of war.
In the event, as the Letter makes clear, two substitutes on the bench (or is it in the dugout?) were not enough. At least five months' worth of the programme had to be re-thought, and not only because of the war. A Complete Sherlock Holmes - five volumes spread over two months – had to be abandoned when the seventy-year-old Frederic Dorr Steele broke down and subsequently died from the strain of attempting to redraw all his original Holmes illustrations and provide new ones for those stories he had not illustrated before. (An LEC Holmes eventually emerged nearly ten years later as a seven volume set.) All Men are Brothers had to be postponed (until 1948) “because Miguel Covarrubias does not work so hard as we would like him to, at least he does not work so hard for us as we would like him to.” And the promised edition of Babbitt as a companion volume to Main Street fell through – forever, alas – over conditions and rights. It was, however, genuinely the war itself which interrupted John Austen's work on The Faerie Queene; war, ill-health and his death in 1948. It was not until 1953 that the LEC appeared, completed by his friend Agnes Miller Parker.
All these tribulations and frustrations – and the usual information about author, illustrator, etc - are related by George Macy (or might it have been John T. Winterich?) with a characteristic exuberance, dry wit and ruefulness that made light of what must in reality have been a desperately difficult time for the Club.
The book itself (which does seem to have come out in August) is remarkable for its lavish use of areas of gold leaf on the title page and as a background to the chapter headings; for the (fake!) golden nugget on the front of the Californian earth coloured front cover, and for the gold paper wrapped Cantelmo box in which it is housed.

> 47
Great info and interesting stories, thanks for sharing!

>47 featherwate:

Indeed, featherwate, a great post! The Fifteenth series was a troubled one, that saw the limitation fall off from the 1500 copies it had maintained since the beginning to about two thirds of that (interestingly, the substitute pitcher One World was, as I remember, the only book in this series published in a limitation of 1500. Another selection was a recycling of Mademoiselle de Maupin which had already been issued to Heritage Club members in its original Nonesuch Press incarnation (whatever the reason, we should be thankful, as Gautier's story is a wonderful book and wonderfully illustrated here).

A measure of how desperate these times were is indicated by the act that George Macy had a nervous breakdown about this time, and was ordered by his doctor to stop working for several months. Whether he heeded this advice or not does not appear in any of my Monthly Letters.

I've uploaded two early Sandglasses to the Drop-box folder. They differ from the familiar Sandglass that for the most part deals with a single book.

The first is Number 101 LL, which is prefaced thus:
EDITED TO GIVE PROPERLY INTERESTED PEOPLE SOME CONFIDENTIAL
INFORMATION ABOUT A UNIQUE VENTURE IN BOOK PUBLISHING: THE
HERITAGE PRESS, WHOSE BOOKS ARE NOW AVAILABLE AT THIS BOOKSHOP.

It appears to have been produced in November/December 1935, as it describes the first six Heritage books (issued on 1 November) and includes glowing reviews from several major newspapers.The reference to "at this bookshop" suggests that the Sandglass may have been provided to booksellers either to mail to likely customers or to tuck inside their stock of HP books in the hope of tempting buyers to come back and buy the others.

The second came out in June or July of 1936, and is the tenth of a series of Sandglasses intended for the booksellers themselves, as the preface makes clear:
Edited to give the book trade some confidential advance news about a unique venture in book publishing: The Heritage Press, Incorporated, 551 Fifth Avenue, New York.
The Directors
CEDRIC R. CROWELL, Doubleday, Doran Shops
A. KROCH, Krocb Bookstores
GEORGE MACY, The Limited Editions Club
FRANK L. MAGEL, The Putnam Bookstore
HAROLD RIEGELMAN, The Limited Editions Club

It describes the six new books planned for Fall 1936 (one of which, Rockwell Kent's Leaves of Grass is to appear in both a $3.75 trade edition of probably 20,000 and an $8.50 limited, signed edition of 1,000). It also says:
"Last Fall there were six books that were published with enthusiasm and acclaim. We are convinced, as so are most of you, that we can sell a great many more of last year's publications if they are reissued in slightly different formats and at reduced and varying prices." (My italics).
Incidentally, the balance of directors - 3 to 2 in favour of booksellers - is a reminder of how closely George Macy worked with the trade during the launch of the Heritage Press: the twelve books in Series A (1935/6) were chosen after a poll of 1500 booksellers (the twelve in series B, however, were voted in by readers).

I hope this ephemeral information is of interest to some!

> 50
"I hope this ephemeral information is of interest to some!"

Oh absolutely featherwate, thank you so much for sharing.

It had been my intention to take some photographs of LEC literature that I have not currently uploaded to the Dropbox shared folder by now, but unfortunately work has been especially busy this month with no apparent let up in sight. I do plan to add to my previous contributions as soon as possible as there are several titles I can provide the Monthly Letter for that are currently missing from our database.

In the meantime, here is encouraging everyone to keep contributing!

Thanks in advance.

After a long search I have finally found a copy of the HP Romeo and Juliet signed by M. Sauvage. Does anyone have a Sandglass for this, I'd love to read it?

I'm not sure there was an individual Sandglass for the first six HP books (which were signed) as I had a combination Sandglass for all six in my copy of A Shropshire Lad. The first six were offered to LEC members first. The non-signed copies which were issued later had Sandglasses, and I think I have a copy of one of those, if that would suffice.

> 54 That would more than suffice, thank you.

>54 Django6924:, 55
"a combination Sandglass"
I think Sandglass 101 LL may be the same as or a variation of this: it's in the Heritage section of the Dropbox under "1935 For Properly Interested People" - there is a brief section For lovers only on Romeo and Juliet on pages 4 and 5.

I've added two Sandglasses to the Dropbox:
Number XII:31 The Aeneid
This is the 1967 New York reissue, which retains the black embossed cover of the 1944 original. (The last page appears twice – apologies, but my pdf program doesn't allow me to edit a document once the scan is complete)
Number III:28 Cyrano de Bergerac (Sandglass plus an insert with seven translations of Cyrano's ballad - "a bit of lagniappe", as the Sandglass calls it !)
This is the second (1964) HP reprint of the 1954 LEC translated by Louis Untermeyer and illustrated by Pierre Brissaud. The first reprint had been issued in 1954 and is the subject of one of Wildcat's excellent illustrated summaries on his blog GMI. He includes the 1954 Sandglass and it differs in some respects from the 1964 one. For example, it says Brissaud provided 25 coloured drawings while the 1964 one says there are 21. This seems odd, as reducing the number of illustrations would surely have required an expensive resetting of the text. In fact as far as I can see it hasn't been reset - the pagination is the same in both printings. There are, however, a few illustrations that are split over two pages – perhaps these were counted as separate in 1954?

>55 starkimarki:,56

Yes, the "combination Sandglass" is indeed 101 LL. Thanks from starkimarki and myself for adding it!

>57 featherwate:

Fascinating stuff, featherwate, I didn't realize this difference occurred, but I suspect you are right in that the 2-page spread illustrations were counted as two illustrations: my LEC copy has 21 illustrations when I count the ones spread over 2 pages as one.

Incidentally, although I think this is a beautifully designed book, and beautifully translated, the watercolors by Brissaud have never appealed to me that much, and I have always wanted to see the 1936 LEC version illustrated by Sylvain Sauvage, who seems to me to most well-suited to illustrate this work. Still, I'm not ready to trade the Untermeyer translation for Bryan Hooker's, and I can't imagine the 1936 binding could be as wonderful as the tapestry-like cloth on the later LEC.

Django,

http://posner.library.cmu.edu/Posner/books/book.cgi?call=842_R75C_1936

will take you to pictures of the 1936 LEC binding and title-page (click to enlarge). Then click on View Book Page Images to go to the start of a high-quality scan of the entire book.
Unfortunately since it is a complete scan, blank pages and all, leafing through to find Sauvage's illustrations is time-consuming, especially as there are fewer of them than in the Heritage edition. But they are delightful.
I haven't tried comparing the translations but I suspect Untermeyer's will indeed be the more readable.

> 57. Thanks indeed, it kills three birds with one stone in my collection, very much appreciated.
>54 Django6924:. I'd still like to see the Romeo and Juliet Sandglass from the later edition if you have it. I have Sandglass Issue 3k for Manon Lescaut from an unsigned edition I bought by mistake if anyone wants that.

LEC Shakespeare Commentaries are now complete!

I have uploaded all missing commentaries for the LEC Shakespeare, as well as the 20-page introductory pamphlet and some miscellaneous reviews that were apparently mailed to subscribers during the rollout of the LEC Shakespeare set. The main folder is located in the Dropbox shared folder "LEC Monthly Letters" under the title "1939 The Comedies Histories & Tragedies of William Shakespeare." Within that main folder is a subfolder for each of the commentaries (note that multi-volume plays only have one commentary, thus there is only one for all three parts of Henry VI), organized by year of publication. I debated whether it was not more useful to just list them all in alphabetical order, but to remain consistent with the other files in this shared Dropbox folder, I kept to the year-title convention. It won't be that difficult to locate an individual play as there are only two possible years (1939 / 1940) and within each year, the files are alphabetical.

Separately, I have created a public Photobucket site which contains amateur photos of all the artwork from each of the 37 volumes. I included a picture of the title page and final page for each volume as well as all six pictures, a total of eight photos per volume, for a grand total of 296 photographs. Unfortunately, I find Photobucket extremely non-intuitive to use and I could not find a way to easily organize the photos. So they have been uploaded in a sort of reverse order. My suggestion is to start with the last picture in the album and then scroll left and you will get all eight pictures per volume (alphabetically) in the correct order. The link is below:

http://s1210.beta.photobucket.com/user/UK_History_Fan/library/LEC%20Shakespeare%...

>61 UK_History_Fan: Thank you! A bibliophotographic Herculean labour.

Thanks for letting me know about the bad link, Robert. Try this one. It is hard for me to tell if it is working as I am signed in as myself, so naturally, it takes me to the correct page. I did make it public, so that should help with access.

http://s1210.beta.photobucket.com/user/UK_History_Fan/library/LEC%20Shakespeare%....

NEW DROPBOX FOLDER: 1941 - The Count of Monte Cristo

I just posted this 4-page Monthly Letter and Publication Announcement card to the Dropbox shared folder.

It has been pretty slow with new additions lately. I would encourage others to contribute some Monthly Letters not currently available so we can continue to fill out this invaluable database. Thanks!

Brilliant timing as I'm currently on page 87 of vol. 1! Thanks Sean.

> 65
Excellent! But if you didn't already have the ML, you should have put in a request here for someone to post it. I have dozens more to photograph and post, but in no particular order, so perhaps one of us could move a specifically requested title to the "front of the line" (or "queue" depending in your country of origin ;-)

If you're taking requests, I have a couple I need to update my blog posts with. I could use Plutarch's Lives, The Aeneid, Saint-Simon's Memoirs, The Essays of Montaigne, The Three-Cornered Hat, The Wanderer, Far from the Madding Crowd, Zadig, Vanity Fair, Moll Flanders, and Man and Superman. If anyone has those, I would greatly appreciate it (and let me know here so I can give you credit if you want it!). Thanks in advance!

In theory I have Saint Simon, Wanderer and Three Cornered hat. I say in theory because they are listed as having letters in my database, but I don't know how accessible the books are in the midst of my growing floor to ceiling piles. Yes, I am already in discussions for having additional bookcases built, and yes, I know it is not good to stack books so high long term!

I will look for these unless someone beats me to it. I think Saint-Simon the most readily accessible if my memory by pile is correct.

Sorry I didn't have any more from your list, but if you get any, let's add them to Dropbox.

68) Great; I'll look forward to those. All of my letters are already in the Dropbox. I suppose only having 20 LEC's (and no spare cash to finance more) makes my part of the task easier than most. :p

It seems that our LEC Dropbox is turning out as a success!

Absolutely! Brilliant idea :-)

Found one more in a recent purchase: The Frogs, now uploaded. This contains the votes for best book of the 1937 7th series, with The Bible topping the list and Walden bringing up the rear.

> 67
Jerry, I have now uploaded the Monthly Letters and Publication Announcements for three of your requested titles to Dropbox: The Three-Cornered Hat, The Wanderer, and Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. Fortunately, these were all within easy reach and I did not have to go digging in the piles of books I still have on my floor :-)

Hopefully, others will step forward to help you out with the other titles you requested, as I would like to see those letters in the Dropbox folder as well.

73) Thank you. :) Alas, I'm still swamped, but I will try to get those onto the blog over Spring Break (with a couple of posts, even!). Much appreciated.

Hello - I was just made aware of this bulletin board - To be in touch with other fans & collectors of the LEC & Heritage Press has been something I have always wanted to do. I have many letters and am looking for many as well.

Who can I contact about joining your drop box or submitting some files - and I read above about YEAR - Title format - (which makes a lot of sense) but any suggestions for optimal resolution on scans ? I will look to catalog and submit a list of what I can contribute but further to UK History Fan post above - I have probably 30 of the first 80 letters (through #80 Way of All Flesh) & many others.

I look forward to hopefully joining and contributing toward a complete database. Not even sure if there is a direct message system here or how to work this but i will learn. - Best Regards Peter

75) Welcome aboard! ironjaw is our Dropbox admin, and he can let you into the Dropbox account. Librarything is a forum, so feel free to contribute to any of the threads you see floating around or start your own! We have a nice community here of fellow Macy fanatics, and it's always nice to see more appreciative folks join us. :)

>75 PW-LEC: Hi Peter and welcome. To direct message someone, just click on their username, which will bring up their profile. From there scroll down and you will see a comments box. This will be a public comment unless you click the box to make it private.

>75 PW-LEC: Welcome! This place is good for your library and bad for your wallet.

> 75
Welcome to one of the most informative and useful of online communities! I am very pleased to hear that you will be contributed to our discussion and are even willing to upload some letters for us. We still have a lot of missing titles. Ironjaw (Faisel), our dropbox administrator, is based in a Denmark, so he is likely to be a different timezone than you, but he usually responds very quickly so I am sure you will get access soon.

Thank you all for the welcome. I am travelling this week, but will look to get my list together for this coming weekend and will drop a note to ironjaw. Peter

I scanned 1933 Anna Karenina &N Aesop's Fables and dropped them into a dropbox, as I can see the Board's Dropbox, but they did not sync...sorry not up with this technology. Glad to email both files to whomever can help and I will get onto more letters

> 81
Someone added the Pudd'nhead Wilson letter today, but I didn't see yours. Feel free to email them to me and I can get them copied over. Will only take a few seconds. You will get the hang of it soon, I promise. My recommendation is if you can access the LEC Monthly Letters shared folder, once you click into the main directory you should see a list of all the other folders (for example "1930 The Decameron"). If you click on one of these subfolders, that should take you to the inner sanctum where the PDF or JPG files are held.

To add your own contributions, you simply create a new folder using the Year Title syntax, and you can either drag and drop from where they are saved on your own personal computer to the newly created dropbox folder (if you have loaded dropbox onto your desktop) or you can "upload" using a web browser at the Dropbox.com site, after logging in as yourself.

It is hard to give instructions remotely, but let me know if that does not help.

It won't show up as I've sent you Peter an invite to our shared folder "LEC Monthly Letters" 10 min. ago. Once you receive this a shared folder will pop up in your dropbox folder. There you can add those scanned files.

I added the Announcement and Monthly Letter for Pudd'nhead Wilson (1974), one of three reasonably-priced UK acquisitions I've been lucky to find this year. The others were the LEC of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1971), and the Heritage Romeo and Juliet illustrated by Sylvain Sauvage (1937). (No ephemera with these, but luckily the Sir G Letter is already in the Drop-box.)
I bought Gawain and the Green Knight from an online charity shop, a bit of a chancy thing to do but it turned to be in very good condition. It's an attractively earthy volume (sepia illustrations - no greens!), a suitably soldierly sort of book with its coarse linen binding feeling a bit like Rupert Brooke's "rough male kiss/Of blankets". And it has the original text and translation on facing pages - definitely a plus point.
Romeo and Juliet is not one of the signed original 1935 issue, which Wildcat's HP exclusives list indicates was slightly upscale of the standard HP run, but it's still a beautiful book.

> 84
Thank you for adding the Monthly Letters. I too hope to someday acquire the Sauvage illustrated HP Romeo and Juliet in fine conditon, but currently, I am not shopping for Heritage books as I am consumed with other collections. I also own the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, though this is not one of my favorites as the illustrations are not really to my liking and I adore the Folio Society coffee table sized edition.

> 85 Each to his own! I thought about the Folio Society edition when I was still a member, but didn't find the illustrations - apart from the wonderful b&w wild boar - appealing enough to overcome my dislike of Simon Armitage's much-admired translation.
(I see the Dropbox Monthly Letter was from your collection - it was good to have access to that.)

> 86
That's funny because I couldn't remember if I uploaded it or not. How could you tell it was from me?

>87 UK_History_Fan: It says Sean beside it (when you open the folder to reveal the pdf).
I assumed this was automatic but I see that all mine are anonymous. You must be doing something right!

> 88
But I don't know what I did! LOL

Perhaps Faisel is secretly tracking my activities for the Danish National Security Service :-)

HAHA! Yes, we're a small country and always suspicious of foreign activities :-)

Glad to announce our newest member Ed, (slacker1) to our team here. He has a complete set of monthly letters sans three and is willing to help us out in scanning them into high resolution PDF :)

There is a long way to go but I think we will soon have a complete catalogue.

> 91
Great news, welcome Ed.

Anyone have the Monthly Letter and Announcement for the 1930 two-volume set of Daudet’s Tartarin Stories?

We're on 1.54 GB of Monthly Letters which is great but I need to do some spring cleaning on my dropbox account. I'm at 8.5 GB out of 10.8 GB just to make sure there is space enough. These letters are important

Do you still get extra space for signing up new members? Perhaps we can send out a call for support!

Yes I do and some members here have given their support which I'm very thankful for. It would be great if we can get more involved.

Did anyone follow the bidding war on the LEC Monthly Letters on ebay? It was crazy $43 for Mediations. And from the bidding activity (you can't see the members id, ebay scrapped that years ago) it looks like it's the same two or three individuals that are bidding against each other. I only bid on one that I managed to get and that was Henry V for $7.99. Yay!

This kind of worries me. I mean thank god we have this Dropbox thing going so we all have access to the letters, but these individuals who are bidding like crazy are surely going to have an affect on sellers on ebay. They might inflate the prices of the books that have the letters or worse sell them separately onwards. I feel like this kind of behaviour is going to have an adverse effect on all of us who are trying to buy LEC books.

What do you all think

I think you'd have to be out of your mind to pay $43 for a monthly letter but the world is made up of all sorts of people and some of them are inordinately wealthy. It's hard for me to believe that there is enough demand for such prices to skew the demand over the long haul. I've bought 4 LECs in the last month for less money and two included monthly letters.

> 97
I agree Faisel, and all the more reason for people to continue contributing to your wonderful database so that we can eventually complete it. I actually paid only $45 for my copy of Meditations (alas, sans ML). I just cannot imagine paying that much for a 4-page letter. While I would obviously prefer a physical copy in hand (or tucked away safely in the book), I have no issue reading the letter on the Dropbox site since it is the content that matters to me more than the physical object.

I have a real problem with sellers who try to separate the letter from the books to profit off them separately. Yes there may be a market, and yes I may have tried to acquire Monthly Letters separately after purchasing the books, but it is not something that should ever be encouraged. Why the original subscribers, who spent so much money on each book (in inflation adjusted prices), would have ever disposed of the Letters or kept them separate from the books is beyond me but it seems the majority of LEC copies available today are without letters and those pre-1950 are often without slipcases. Very disheartening.

>98 kdweber: and 99 Yes I agree with both of. I'm not that fussy either with the letters. I used to be when I started out collecting and picked up some letters individually but now it's not a priority. I'm happy with Dropbox.

Ken, I liked your upload of The Jungle newsletter and announcement in PDF (which I requested some time ago). The PDF works best as, I've uploaded it to my Google Drive account, set it to share. I use Google Drive because it let's you share with a permanent link; Dropbox cannot do this. It also works as redundancy and backup, should something happen to our files in Dropbox.

I then copied the link and put it into my Comments section in LT next to The Jungle LEC book, so that I can access it where ever I am and read it on screen, for example on my iPad. My aim is to this to every LEC book I have. It's slow, yes but overly gratifying.

You can see the listing here. Just browse down to The Jungle.

>100 ironjaw: Faisel, I like the added link but that's a lot of added work.

I have finally gotten around to taking an inventory of what monthly letters I have. I now need to compare what I have that the dropbox does not so I can start adding some. I do know the list of books I have that do not have the monthly letter, so if you happen to have any of these, please please let me know (sorry, the list is long!). If you have a specific request that you are looking for, let me know, and I will let you know if I have it.

Education of Henry Adams
Little Flowers of Assisi
Persuasion
Flowers of Evil/Les Fleurs du Mal (1940)
Tales of Soldiers and Civilians
Devil's Dictionary
Religio Medici
Pilgrim's Progress
Way of All Flesh
The Stranger
Sartor Restartus
Discovery and Conquest of Mexico
Short Stories Chekhov
Cicero Orations
Confessions od an Opium Eater
Evergreen Tales (ALADDIN AND THE WONDERFUL LAMP, Three Bears, JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS)
Confucius (1933)
Youth, Typhoon
Last of the Mohicans
The Prince
Robinson Crusoe
Great Expectations
Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Sister Carrie
Camille (1937)
Euripides 3 Plays
Madame Bovary (1938)
Crie of Sylvestre Bonnard
Divine Comedy
Beggar's Opera
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Man without a Country
House of Seven Gables
Kwaidan
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Green Mansions
Notre-Dame de Paris (1930)
Brave New World
Far Away and Long Ago
Rip Van Winkle
Daisy Miller
In the Penal Colony
Rubaiyat
Tales of East and West
Imaginary Conversations
Main Street
History of Early Rome
White Fang
Of the Nature of Things
Black Swan
Death in Venice
Spoon River Anthology
Of Human Bondage
Typee
Utopia
Oregon Trial
Plato Three Dialogues
Tales of Mystery and Imagination
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
Captain's Daughter
Eugene Onegin
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Malte Laurids Brigge (Rilke)
Magician of Lublin
Tristan Shandy
Sentimental Journey
Kidnapped
Dracula
Walden
Peloponnesian War
War and Peace
Slovenly Peter
Tom Sawyer
Francois Villon (1933)
Age of Innocence
Ethan Frome
Snowbound
History of Selborne
Ballad Reading Gaol
Picture of Dorian Gray
Our Town
Anabasis
Sermon on the Mount
Four Gospels
PANCHATANTRA

Kwaidan and Main Street please.

I need those also!!! My list above is what I need!!

Sorry for posting again, but anypne have Daudet’s Tartarin Stories?

Busywine: Maybe what you could do is that when you have received the ones you need then delete the names of the titles in your post 102 above?

I might have History of Early Rome and Notre Dame. Will have to check

Busywine: I have roughly a similar list, but I will put Imaginary Conversations asap.

You may have noticed that your blog is still dormant, you should do something about it!

> 105
I would love Tartarin as well. I suspect the extremely small size of this two-book set made keeping the Monthly Letter more difficult as it would not slot nicely into the book without multiple folding.

>107 UK_History_Fan: I agree that the small size of the Tartarin makes it harder to keep the Monthly Letter together with the books; though, my copy of The Kasidah did come with a "quartered" copy of the letter. I'm about to replace the slipcase and I am think of leaving a separate slot for the folded newsletter.

>105 ironjaw: My copy of Tartarin is missing the Monthly Letter as well; though, technically I have a copy of the letter since I have the bound copy of the first 50 letters published in 1987. This book is a great edition to any LEC collector's library. It includes the first four letters of the club which were sent out before any of the books were published. Unfortunately, it is difficult to scan the book on my flatbed scanner.

> 108
Well that compliation book has been on my wish list for a while. I have yet to find a fairly priced fine condition copy.

I've added Sandglass Number VI 21 for the 1956 HP reissue of The Gods Are a-Thirst, originally published in 1942 as part of the Heritage/Nonesuch series of great French romances.
I've also uploaded two Monthly Letters (with announcements): Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales from 1966, a nicely unfussy production with nearly 30 illustrations by Valenti Angelo; and Virgil's The Georgics from 1952. This is a large book (but quite short - 150-odd pages) and a very handsome one, beautifully printed in Verona by Hans Mardersteig with some of the finest typesetting I've yet come across. The rag paper, the pages deckled on two edges, is thick and remarkably soft, and more like the paper used during the 1930s. The illustrations are of equal quality, by Bruno Bramanti - tho', oddly, he is not given a credit on the main title page.
As well as a baize-lined slipcase, the book has a paper (not glassine) dust-wrapper, something I haven't come across before. It's plain except that the spine carries Virgil's name, the book title and the copy number. Are there are other LECs like this? I wondered if it might have been added to protect the hand-printed pattern on the binding. Whatever the reason it's a piece of luck: there's absolutely no sunning to the book's spine.

Curious note: the Monthly Letter refers to Mardersteig as Hans, his birth name, but on the book's colophon he is Giovanni and signs as 'G Mardersteig'. The same happens with the previous year's The Betrothed. According to the Italian Wikipedia he became Giovanni in 1948, when he received Italian citizenship. I guess his biographical information was carried over from pre-war LECs he did. Wildcat has recently pointed out other instances of this.

>110 featherwate:

featherwate, LECs printed by Mardersteig came with paper dust-wrappers, not glassine, (except for, perhaps, ones in the 1970s and 1980s when Martino Mardersteig succeeded Giovanni) usually plain paper with just the title and author on the spine, and usually the limitation number.

Some kind of protection is most definitely needed, as most of the bindings from the Officina Bodoni or Stamperia Valdonega were gorgeous but somewhat delicate cloth and tapestry-like bindings that tended to show handling marks more than plainer buckram. Still, I sometimes wonder about these paper wrappers. The papers on my 1936 Imginary Conversations are in Fine condition and have well protected the binding. On my 1954 The Gallic Wars, however, the spine of the dust-wrapper is noticeably browned, and some browning seems to have faintly occurred on the book's spine as well. It seems obviously the effect of sunning, but I wonder why the paper didn't prevent this on the binding. Could it be that the paper used for the dust-wrapper was not acid-free archival quality?

110) I just bought a later printing of The Gods are A-Thrist myself last time I was in Monterey, so I'll have to see if we have the same Sandglass. And yes, the differences between various printings can be an interesting little contrast at times.

>111 Django6924: Thanks for the information, Django. I omitted to say that at some point an owner or dealer encased the dust-wrapper in an acid-free Brodart cover, which may have further protected the book and the wrapper (and will continue to do so, I hope).
Maybe binding dyes vary in their susceptibility to fading - I don't what colour The Gallic Wars spine is, but the Georgics is a deep green buckram.

The combination of Mardersteig and Bramanti is a winning one. I have added The Betrothed to my hope-to-get list.

>112 WildcatJF: Jerry, according to the invaluable Mr Bussacco there are at least three printings - the 1942 original , with hand-coloured stencil illustrations from the Charlize Brakely studio in New York, and two in 1956, with rubber plate illustrations from the Arrow Press of New York. One is bound in the series 'faded tapestry' design and the other in full blue leather. A quick google doesn't show up any of the leather copies for sale, so if one ever comes up it's probably priced fairly high. Myself, I'm happy with the series binding!

Edited to get Bruno Bramanti's name right - I keep conflating it into Brumante, as if he was an Italian celebrity couple like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie!

Does anyone have the Monthly Letter for the 1949 version of Brothers Karamazov they can upload to Dropbox?

I recently sold a shrink-wrapped copy of the Easton Press 100 Greatest edition of this to a work colleague since I have decided to get rid of all my Easton Press books in the 100 Greatest series in order to replace them with the higher quality Heritage and/or Limited Editions Club versions. She elected to read this book first and brought it in to show me. This is already on my LEC wish list for the Fritz Eichenberg illustrations, but I took a few moments to look at each and every illustration in the book (there are so many, and that assumes EP reproduced all of them, since they are sometimes prone to pruning). I also read the Publisher's Preface, which is sort of the EP version of the Monthly Letter, except bound in the book as an additional Preface rather than as a loose insert. I noted that the Constance Garrett translation was "revised" by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. I assume this revision was commissioned by Macy and not EP as I cannot imagine them spending any additional money on it. I am hoping the Monthly Letter talks about this update to the standard English language translation. If not, I am sure Robert will know something! That man is a walking encyclopedia.

>113 featherwate:

The Betrothed is an outstanding LEC, done in the typical Mardersteig style of restrained binding--woodblock-printed paper boards and beautiful linen half binding--, delectable paper, gorgeous typography with the wonderful engravings (in this case re-engravings of Gonin's original illustrations) of Bramanti. In this respect it's very much like the LEC's and Mardersteig's Last Days of Pompeii and Quo Vadis; but whereas those historical novels are respectable, though not of the highest level of artistry, Manzoni's novel is the great Italian literary masterpiece after Dante and Boccaccio.

>114 UK_History_Fan:

I have the Heritage Press Eichenberg-illustrated The Brothers Karamazov, but my Monthly Letter for my 1933 LEC Karamazov, illustrated by Alexander King, has the following (I'm somewhat abridging the full text):

"The best of the available translations was prepared by Constance Garnett...but Miss Garnett's translations are full of incredibly obvious errors, as we found when we used her translation for our edition of Anna Karenina. So we approached Dr. Avrahm Yarmolinsky, who heads the section devoted to Russian books at the New York Public Library, and we secured his services...we feel here, am endlichsten, is the proper translation of The Brothers Karamazov into English."

This appears to have been the same translation used in my Heritage Press Eichenberg edition, and ergo the same used for the Eichenberg LEC.

Incidentally, in addition to his librarian duties, Dr. Yarmolinsky taught Slavonic languages at Macy's alma mater, Columbia University, wrote a biography of Dostoevsky, translated much Russian literature, and found time to marry Babette Deutsch, poet, translator of the LEC's Eugene Onegin, and most sympathetic translater of Pasternak's poetry.

> 115
Thanks Robert. Interesting that the translation revisions were done for the 1933 edition. I own this (sans ML), and realize its in the Dropbox, but I just assumed (incorrectly it would seem) that the revisions, if ordered by Macy at all, would have been for the 1949 version. I didn't realize that both LEC versions of Brothers Karamazov use the same revised translation.

Robert has sent me the scans for Daudet’s Tartarin Stories and I will upload the letter on Dropbox when I get home from the office.

Uploaded the Monthly Letters for Daudet's Tartarin Stories. Thanks goes to Robert for all the hard work for scanning these

I've just added scans of the 1949 Brothers Karamazov monthly letter to the dropbox. I also included pdfs. Not sure how the updating works, but I imagine that somehow changes made will be reflected automatically.

> 119
Thank you! I was hoping to read this soon.

Today, I have added the following letters to the dropbox:

1995 Sight and Touch
1994 Wuthering Heights
1994 Le Paysan de Paris
1984 The Magician of Lublin
1967 Three Plays of Euripides
1957 Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
1952 Tom Jones
1967 The Gambler and Notes from Underground
1968 Symposium, Phaedrus and Lysis

I added today:
Salammbo, Break of the Dfy, Knights of the Round Table, Charles Darwin, Petroneus, Emily Dickinson

>121 parchment: >122 skyschaker:
Thank you!

>122 skyschaker:

thank you very much, I have been wanting the Salammbo letter for a long time.

I've uploaded the Monthly Letter and preliminary announcement for Omoo. I'd initially intended to buy the Heritage Press edition, being attracted by the binding's wraparound enlargement of one of Reynolds Stone's illustrations for the book (Stone is one of my favourite engravers). But then I came across a very good, reasonably priced LEC copy and went for that instead. I'm glad I did. The covers are decorated with a pattern of waves – a conventional enough design for a sea story except that here it's been carried out with a spiky, swirling élan, hand-marbled by Cockerell's on to the actual cloth of the binding. The top third of the spine, which is flat-backed, is a leather title label that's pressed into the cloth. OMOO is written vertically in large gilt letters designed by Stone (Stone is also one of my favourite lettering engravers!). He produced nearly 40 illustrations for the book and is another of those artists like Gordon Grant and Edward Wilson whose flair for marine subjects the LEC was so good at harnessing.
The volume was designed by John Dreyfus, a man firmly of D. B. Updike's opinion that the designer's overriding responsibility is to produce a readable book.
There is a small, elegant bookplate in the name of Norman J. Sondheim. I googled him with the idle thought he might be a relative of Stephen and found that he was in fact a leading American book collector (and lawyer, businessman, educator and golf nut). He died aged 97 in September 2011 and his collection (or part of it) was included in a fine press auction the following February. He owned items from presses such as Golden Cockerel, Gregynog, Grabhorn, Kelmscott (a Chaucer that sold for nearly $53,000), Nonesuch, Shakespeare Head, Spiral, Pennyroyal and Officina Bodoni. I can forgive a man of such taste almost anything, even 83 years spent playing golf.
A heavily illustrated catalog of the sale, one where you can 'turn' the pages, is still accessible at
http://www.swanngalleries.com/3dcat/2269/#/I/. It has some fabulous things in it.

I've got Norman J. Sondheim's LEC Notre Dame de Paris (Masereel) sitting on my shelf.

>125 featherwate: & 126 I've got his LEC copy of All Men Are Brothers.

>127 kdweber: From Different Drummer Books? I saw it on Abebooks a couple of days ago and ordered it - only for Tom to apologize for having already sold it and forgotten to de-list it!

>128 featherwate: yep

>129 kdweber: Bad luck for me but I'm glad it's gone to a member of this group!

Does anyone have the LEC Portrait of a Lady letter? I saw that someone had already uploaded Capt. Cook's (and a hearty thank you to whomever that was!), but I did not see that listed above or in my Dropbox folder. Thanks in advance!

Dropped a line to Faisel requesting access to the Dropbox.

Does anybody perchance have the LEC letter for the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon)? Or is it already available on Dropbox?

All the best,
-Nick

Last I checked it wasn't on the Dropbox site but I will second your request for posting it by someone who does own it.

>132 nicklong:
"Decline and Fall" is not there. I'd like to read it as well... Anyone wants to be a Good Samaritan?
However, having an leisure hour yesterday evening, I uploaded a bunch of MLs from 1947 - to 1951, those that I have.
An apple a day... and all MLs will be there . One lucky day.

>131 WildcatJF:

I may have it, Jerry--I'll check tonight.

>132 nicklong:,134

Alas, no--this is an LEC set that has eluded me more times than I can count.

>135 Django6924:
Django, your message stays not very clear to me... Asking about Good Samaritan, I meant, if there is anyone who has the ML for "the Decline and Fall" and this kind somebody has means and time to upload this ML to the dropbox.

The set of books is wonderful, I got it time ago in a very nice condition and have enjoyed this set for about 10 years.

>"Django, your message stays not very clear to me"

OK, I do not have the LEC Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, more's the pity, ergo, as much as I would like to be a Good Samaritan, I have to play the part of the Levite in this case and pass on by.

>131 WildcatJF:
Hi Jerry, I do have the ML for The Portrait of a Lady--I'll take it to the office tomorrow and scan it.

I've just uploaded Decline and Fall to Dropbox - jpegs and pdf. Enjoy all.

Apologies to all, but I labeled the Decline folder as 1944. It should be 1945 Decline and Fall. Should I correct this on my end or can someone there do it?

137) That's fantastic. I'll look forward to it!

>138 slacker1: Much thanks slacker1! That was quite the surprise to come home to find that "8 files have been added to your Dropbox" and the files being of Decline & Fall. It's very much appreciated!

For unknown reasons, I do not see this folder, neither in 1944 nor - in 1945. It disappeared?

Ghosts, probably...

>142 skyschaker:

The folder should be there under 1945.

>142 skyschaker:, 143 Somehow the folder has appeared at the top of the dropbox list before 1930 Tartarin of Tarascon.

I've uploaded the Monthly Letter and Publisher's Announcement for The Turn of the Screw (1949), illustrated by Mariette Lydis but not signed by her. As George Macy explained (with 'bewilderment as well as regret'), this was because “we have lost touch with her. We have as a result been unable to get her to place her signature upon the colophon pages: a possibly-pleasing step which we usually take with those of our books illustrated by artists who refrain from dying, or disappearing, while we are reproducing their drawings."
Every syllable of that written through gritted teeth, I'd say. Apparently she sent him her drawings from Buenos Aires and then disappeared (or perhaps ignored his attempts to get in touch). Coming only a year after Miguel Covarrubias's protracted completion of his All Men Are Brothers commission, her behaviour must have made Macy think again about his pre-war assertion that artists were more professional than printers when it came to meeting deadlines.
His mood cannot have been improved by knowing that The Turn of the Screw would be one of the last books, if not the last, to be produced in conjunction with the Worthy Paper Company of Massachusetts. According to the Monthly Letter, the company had closed its mill the previous year (1948), having supplied Macy with superior paper for 20 years: 60 tons of it for the LEC Complete Shakespeare alone, and for the Heritage Club, paper guaranteed to last at least 200 years. It also provided the paper for the Nonesuch Dickens (1937-8).
NB A 2005 book says that the mill was closed in the 1930s and burned down in 1975. Perhaps this means only that the company abandoned one mill building to continue business in another. Anyway, there's a picture of the (or a) Worthy mill circa 1910 at

next to Rockwell Kent's Falstaff, whom I rather like even though I'd never thought of him as looking like that.

Does anybody have the Sandglass for the 1935 Heritage Press Romeo and Juliet?

>146 kdweber: - Is that the one we discussed from ebay last week? There was no Sandglass per se, but see the general one for the first 6 entitled 'For Properly Interested People'.

I have found another couple of letters and uploaded 1957 Dombey and 1966 Prisoner of Zenda.

>147 starkimarki: No, but that discussion piqued my interest. I got mine on ABE for much less. Mint condition in a worn box that has done its job. A beautiful book and hard to tell that it's not an LEC except for the limitation and lack of signature (no, this was not one of the signed 1500). Before this book, I had never seen an HP book that came in a box instead of a slipcase.

When did HP start including an individual Sandglass? Green Mansions in 1937?

>148 kdweber:
"When did HP start including an individual Sandglass? Green Mansions in 1937?"
Can't say for sure, as I don't have any Sandglasses earlier than a handful in Series D and E, but I think it probably was Green Mansions, the first book in Series A. Michael Bussacco certainly begins his first Sandglass Companion (1937-1959) with it.
His Catalog and Checklist and his Annotative Bibliography of the Heritage Press Volumes (an A to R by-author list giving considerable detail of the successive printings of each HP) do go back to the First Series that started in late 1935. But as far as I can see from these, none of the First Series editions (which included the first issue of Green Mansions) had an individual Sandglass.

Sandglasses for four Heritage exclusives added to the Dropbox:

3D......Washington Irving: Diedrich Knickerbocker's History of New York (August 1940). A solid, chunky book designed to match the 1939 HP edition of Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Its suitably exaggerated illustrations are original lithographs by Don Freeman.
10D....The Sonnets of William Shakespeare (March 1941) - lovely volume, superb decorations by Valenti Angelo (in pastel colours, no gold-leaf); he also designed the book.
2E.......Laurence Sterne: A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (July 1941). I prefer its Sylvain Sauvage illustrations to those in the LEC by Eric Gill and his son-in-law, though I still like the Gwen Raverat wood engravings in my old 1938 Penguin - she had a way with lecherous expressions. The Sandglass unsurprisingly talks quite a bit about the fact that France is now under German occupation, with Sauvage's whereabouts unknown.
6E.......Richard H. Dana Jr.: Two Years Before The Mast (November 1941). Attractive dark blue binding with sailing ship silhouetted against gold moon and stars - makes you want to read the book! The designer, Dale Nichols, also did numerous in-text four-colour and black & white illustrations, very simple style perfectly matched to the story. Seems to be the only work he did for Macy, which is a shame.

No 3D carries the results of a poll of HC members rating the 12 books of the previous series (C). The top three were
R.v.R. - the Life of Rembrandt
The Rubaiyat (Arthur Szyk)
Candide (Sauvage again)
And the bottom three were Idylls of the King (Robert Ball), followed by Oliver Twist and another Dickens, the Five Christmas Novels.

>150 featherwate:

Four aces, featherwate--all are exclusive to the Heritage Press and are some of my very favorites of Macy's output in the early years of that organization. I've always felt that the early version of Dana's book is even better than the later reprint of the LEC edition with Mueller's illustrations. Nichols' art is, as you say, perfect for the book and executed in that expensive fashion that so often was a hallmark of early HP books. I have rhapsodized for years over the binding--beautiful and beautifully appropriate for the book--but that damned navy-blue dye has the greatest propensity for sunfading; I've never seen a copy that didn't have some measure of spine fading (does yours?), and often to a pale lavender. I bought four copies of this book before I found one with a barely perceptible amount of fading--that's how much I admire this book.

The Sauvage-illustrated A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy is another gem which also suffers from the dreaded blue-dye fading on the spine. I agree it's a superior version to the LEC High Wycombe version (although that version is beautifully printed, I'm not a huge fan of Gill, and Tegetmeier's illustrations seem a little pale compared to Sauvage's. I'd like to see pictures of the Penguin version--I have two other illustrated editions of this work: one in a crazy Art Deco-ish style by Norah MacGuiness, and my favorite, an edition illustrated by the redoubtable Valenti Angelo with his characteristically brilliant style. For years I've been trying to find a copy of the first edition of this book I read--I don't know who was the publisher nor the illustrator, but I remember the illustrations as being particularly risqué--and delightful. I especially remember the last one, illustrating when Yorick reaches his hand through the bed curtains to apologize to the lady in the adjoining bed and "when I stretch'd out my hand I caught hold of the fille de chambre's--" I remember the illustration of the decidedly startled expression of the f d c. (Incidentally, Macy was decidedly not an isolationist at this early date--his distaste for the Nazis is palpable in the passage you mention in the Sandglass.)

>151 Django6924: "I bought four copies of this book before I found one with a barely perceptible amount of fading"

Glad to know I'm not alone in purchasing multiple copies of an HP title until I find one in the best condition possible.

Thanks for writing at length about these unique titles. I'm not to familiar with the HP-only books.

> 151 "I've never seen a copy that didn't have some measure of spine fading (does yours?)"
Yep ! And the Sentimental Journey copy, too. As it was 1941, perhaps all the fast blue dyes were being stockpiled by prescient naval uniform contractors....
You can see Gwen Raverat's illustrations at
http://www.gwenraverat.com/category/17980/illustrations/a-sentimental-journey
Not sure I like MacGuiness's pictures but whoever the compositor was who put the title page together he or she was a genius. Worth getting the book for that alone! Angelo's approach is, as you say, original and creative as always.
Re your 'lost' edition - it might be this one:
The Black Sun Press / Editions Narcisse issued a limited edition in 1929 illustrated fairly racily by Polia Chentoff, about whom I know nothing except that she died young:
http://www.tristramshandyweb.it/sezioni/sterne/biography/sterne_portraits/sentim...

>153 featherwate: "As it was 1941, perhaps all the fast blue dyes were being stockpiled by prescient naval uniform contractors...."

Of course! I wasn't thinking of that, but I bet you are right! Kind of like "Lucky Strike Green goes to war!"

I can see why you like Riverat's--they have much of the exuberance of Sauvage's, but with a better facility for facial expressiveness. I like MacGuiness's illustrations as art, but in my opinion they aren't right for the book. Thank you for the link to the Black Sun Press edition (I had wondered if that was the one), but Chentoff's are not the ones I remember. The ones I'm thinking of had a very formal construction, despite their raciness. Though they weren't silhouettes (at least most of them weren't), they had the same charm and precision as Lotte Reiniger's silhouettenfilms.

I've added another Sandglass from the 1940s, not a Heritage exclusive this time but the 1944 Heritage edition of the same year's LEC Life on the Mississippi, humorously and profusely illustrated in brown, black and white, and full page colour by Thomas Hart Benton. Perhaps not quite as profusely as mentioned in the Sandglass - if you claim there are 'nearly sixty lively pictures' it would be wiser not to preface the text with a list showing there are only 44 ! Macy's members could be a cantankerous lot - I wonder if anyone of them returned the book for being 25 percent under-illustrated?
I wouldn't have. It was apparently Hart Benson's first time illustrating a book in colour. For what I paid for it, it would still be a bargain with only half the claimed illustrations.

I've added the Sandglass for another 1940s Heritage exclusive to the Dropbox; this is the first Sandglass I've come across that runs to only two sides. A wartime economy, perhaps?

9F......Charles Lamb: A Complete Elia (February 1943). This omnibus of Lamb's two essay collections never appeared as an LEC, which is a pity. Gordon Ross provides over 20 black-and-white drawings (ranging in size from one-third to nearly full page), and eight full-page colour-plates “reproduced by the photogravure process, in black ink and a sort of saffron-coloured ink.” This slightly muddy sounding combination of inks actually works pretty well, but an LEC that faithfully reproduced Ross's original mixed-media illustrations (pencil, crayon and watercolour) would have been a livelier affair.
There's a comparison of the two versions of The Milkmaid, one of Ross's best illustrations, here:
Street Seller
Click the pictures and they'll enlarge - or possibly not: I haven't mastered the uncongenial new Flickr set-up yet.
BTW, the original illustration is for sale with a New York dealer: $1,000.

The Sandglass mentions that only one edition of each of the two essay collections was published in Lamb's life. So it's ironic that as far as I can tell from Michael C. Bussacco's reference books, this Heritage Press edition seems also to have been a one-off. An absence of reprints could explain why there don't seem to be many copies around.

>156 featherwate:

Thanks for sharing this, featherwate! My copy, which is remarkably fine condition, lacks a Sandglass, and I hadn't realized the original Ross illustrations were in full color. I've always been particularly fond of the one of the peg-legged veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar and would like to see Ross's original--do you know if there is a link to these?

> 157 Robert, sadly I have found only one other example of original art from Elia, the frontispiece, which is with the same seller, who has a dozen or so Ross works (some of them pencil sketches). You can see it at
James Cummins

At first sight, he appears to be describing the Elia frontispiece as belonging to the Heritage Geoffrey Crayon; some of whose illustrations, come to think of it, are in full colour, though not as subtle in style as the Elia pictures - appropriately, as it is not as subtle a book.

The Trafalgar veteran is a great character! As a small consolation, here is another old peg-leg, rather more happily circumstanced:

Edward A. Wilson's picture

Very nice! Wilson is a sometimes frustrating illustrator--sometimes spot on, at other times, underwhelming. Here he is right on--where is this from?

>159 Django6924:
Django, it's from Iron Men and Wooden Ships: Deep Sea Chanties, the book that first made people sit up and take notice of Wilson. Published by Doubleday, Page & Company in 1924, it was described rather convolutedly by the New York Times as
The latest, as it is by far the most engaging, volume of these hardy and not entirely unapologetic ballads....the anthologist being Frank Shay, with Edward A. Wilson furnishing a jolly fine set of embellishing color decorations and woodcuts. (NYT December 21 1924)
The first trade edition was preceded by two hundred 'deluxe' copies. Each of these included a laid-in coloured woodcut and a detachable wood engraving, both signed by the artist, and had endpapers decorated with coloured flags (the trade edition has plain endpapers).
It's a splendid book, large, well-designed and printed to a high standard. EAW's dozens of illustrations - from b&w vignettes to full page colour - exactly catch the humour and cynicism and robust spirit of these work-songs. I'm not sure his breakthrough book wasn't also his best (a depressing thought for any creative person!).
I have a copy and am uploading some images to SmugMug (my post-Flickr home - I hope). I'll post a link.

156) Well, well, well, another Heritage Press exclusive to add to my list!

Just Added 1980 Poems by Robert Graves.

Does anybody have the Letter for the 1951 William Tell, LEC ?

Reynard the Fox and Prometheus Bound anyone?

Prometheus, yes; Robinson, I'm pretty sure I have it, but I can't do any scanning until the weekend.

> 166 Did you have the Prometheus?

Just upload Reynard the fox .

I would like to see Prometheus too ^^

Thanks. I hadn't realized that the colours were applied by hand!

Everyone please forgive me for being so slow to respond, but the last few weeks have been hectic. I have both the Prometheus and Crusoe MLs and brought my scanner home and will scan and upload them tomorrow. Without fail! I promise!

Does anyone have the Monthly Letter for American Indian Legends (1968)?

After clearing everything else from my computer's Dropbox folder, I think I was able to add the Prometheus Monthly Letter. Hopefully someone will confirm that.

I had a problem with my Robinson Crusoe scan and will have to redo it today.

I couldn't see it , the Prometheus, perhaps it needs some time to update

No, it's not there.

OK, I sent it to featherwate to upload. I'm not sure why my Dropbox isn't working for me...

With one bound he was free...should be there now!

It is indeed! Thank you both.

Robert can you log in to Dropbox on their website? And then go to LEC Monthly Letters folder? Try to upload a test file called test.pdf and I'll see if I can see it on my computer.

> 173
No American Indian Legends volunteers?

>181 UK_History_Fan:

I need it too!

Good to see that we're nearing ca. 250 letters excluding The Shakespeare collection. I think we all need to congratulate everyone here that have contributed to this collection. It is great achievement. Hear, hear fellowmen and fellow-ladies.

Hear! Hear!

I know I still owe Robinson Crusoe, which I will rescan tonight. But I feel that I have forgotten about some others I was supposed to do (sorry--the effects of advancing age). Is anyone still waiting for ones I said I would do?

Anyone please upload the following Monthly Letter ? or just give informations about their paper, typeface, and how the illustration was reproduced ( lithography, wood engrave, etching , etc), thanks

The Last Days of Pompeii
Sense and Sensibility
Notre-Dame de Paris

>186 kafkachen:

The Monthly Letter for Sense and Sensibility should be in the Dropbox. I haven't a Monthly Letter for Pompeii, but did upload the Announcement Card.

>164 the_bb:

I finally got Robinson Crusoe's Monthly Letter uploaded as well. It is a scan from my copy of The First 50 Monthly Letters so it is only 3 pages--I did not scan the 3rd of the 4 pages as it was just a reproduction of one of Ruzicka's illustrations for the forthcoming edition of La Fontaine's Fables. I don't like to overdo scanning from the book as it's hard on the spine.

>187 Django6924:
Thank you.
Too bad in the Monthly Letter of Sense and Sensibility ,there is no mention of how the artwork was produced and reproduced.

Does anyone have the Monthly Letter that was issue with Albert Camus' The Stranger in 1971? If so, I'd love a scan. Thanks!

I've added Sandglass (No. III: 20) to the Heritage Press section of the Dropbox. It's for the 1955 Heritage edition of the previous year's LEC of The Masque of Comus (lyrics by John Milton, music by Henry Lawes). By a macabre coincidence, both the the illustrator, Edmund Dulac, and Hubert Foss, the scholar who edited the music, died within a couple of days of one another in 1953.
An attractive volume.

Hi, I will send this appeal again in case someone out there has it. I am looking for an upload to the Dropbox folder of both American Indian Legends and Zadig. Please upload a copy if you are lucky enough to own the Monthly Letters for these two books. Thanks!

I have the ML for Zadig and will upload tomorrow.

I'd also like the American Indian Legends ML.

Thanks Robert!

Does anyone have the LEC ML for Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray? I would greatly appreciate a scan. Also, I'm still looking for the ML from Albert Camus' The Stranger.

Also, I am going to be scanning a number of MLs and putting them in the dropbox within the next few days. I think I have all of the following missing MLs:

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
The Natural History of Selbourne
Kipling's Tales of East and West
Three Tales of Gustav Flaubert
The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde
The Trial
Childhood Boyhood Youth
A Lost Lady
The Captive Mind
Death in Venice
A Raw Youth
The Overcoat / Government Inspector
The Possessed
The Magic Mountain

> 195
Andrew, that would be an amazing contribution to our collection. Thank you so much! I just checked my notes, and unfortunately, I do not have either ML you are looking for (I also do not own these titles yet!)

I've just posted a few monthly letters (and some announcements) in searchable pdf format:

1946 The Book of Job
1970 From the Earth to the Moon
1970 The Spectator
1972 Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
1973 White Fang
1983 A Lost Lady
1985 The Secret Sharer

Thanks Ken! I can now take two of those titles off my to-do list.