Item 23 - Letter from Max Farrand to W. W. Greg

1 single sheet

Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California.—Discusses the Harvard University Press facsimile of the first quarto of Hamlet.

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Transcript

Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California
May 28, 1931.

W. W. Greg, Esq.
Park Lodge, Wimbledon Common
London, S. W. 19, England

My dear Greg,

Thank you warmly for your letter. It is that of a real friend of the Library. Far from resenting your criticisms and suggestions I would assure you that they are borne out in every particular by our own experience. We ought not to have attempted our choicest item as the first of our facsimiles. We have learned a lot but you must give us credit for not having attempted to disguise the faults in our results. When we saw the results we were proud of certain features and disappointed in others but we tried to state the facts, so that students could rely on what we put forth. [Handwritten in the margin:] The last page was deliberate—that is the way it is in our copy, and we are reproducing the H.E.H. copy.

A unique Thomas Wyat item {1} will be out very shortly and that is reproduced by heliotype and we think an improvement, but we are with another item, now going to press, trying to eliminate the intermediate stages and photograph directly upon the block for the printer. I don't correctly understand the process but our photographer and the collotype people are both excited over it.

I could, by the way, tell you some interesting stories of the complications of our Hamlet reproduction at a distance. We had to read proof exactly as in a printed work and sent certain pages back to be done over because they had been made legible.

There is another feature of our publications that I want to stress and that is our desire to keep the price within reason. We cannot do things as cheaply as you do in England but they are not expensive according to our standards. They are for scholars, not for collectors.

Again thanking you for writing, I am

Sincerely yours,
Max Farrand

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Typed, except the signature, two corrections, and the marginal addition.

{1} Quyete of Mynde, Wyatt's translation of Plutarch's De tranquillitate animi. A facsimile of the copy in the Huntington Library was published by the Harvard University Press in 1931.

Formerly inserted in Greg's copy of the Harvard University Press facsimile of the First Quarto of Hamlet (1931) (LL 027 SHA 300).

This description was created by A. C. Green in 2020.