“Furthermore, it seems unwise to spread this broadcast among the citizenry just now. They might get panicky. General Putnam says that it would upset his whole system of defense if this became common talk on the streets.
“But I will tell you what I will do. You might leave the story here, and I can have one of my men work it over into a bully Sunday feature story on ‘The Red-Coats in New England,’ describing the various points of interest along the route that the British troops march, with pictures showing the house on the corner of the street near which they landed in Charlestown, and perhaps the town-hall in Medford. We have plenty of red-hot pictures like that in our Division of Photographs and a great story ought to be worked up on this piece as a basis. We will put it out for you through our regular channels, and most of the trade papers and farm journals in the country will carry it.”
And thus, my children, you would hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. But that is not all. Far from it.
It is an accepted fact that General Washington crossed the Delaware River. I think that I violate no confidence when I say that. Furthermore, it is conceded that it was a rather slick bit of work and done with a minimum of publicity and stir. And yet, had there been adequate military censorship think how much better it might have been done!
The Government would first have advertised in Trenton for bids on the furnishing of row-boats. It would have specified that these boats should be twelve feet, four inches long, with a four-feet beam, large enough to carry a dozen soldiers, with one boat equipped with a platform in the bow large enough for a general to stand on in a picturesque attitude. It would have specified that the firm offering the winning bid should have the boats on the New Jersey shore at 9:00 Thursday night, equipped with long poles.
Following this, a space along the water-front would be roped off and patrolled by Continental troops, so that no one could suspect that anything was going to happen in that vicinity.
In the meantime, the Military Censor would have got in his precautionary work and a notice would have been sent out to the editors of the various journals of the day, saying:
“It is requested that no mention, editorial or otherwise, be made of the intended crossing of the Delaware River by General Washington and his troops. In co-operating with the Government in this matter, the press will be aiding materially in winning the war.”
The following news items, however, would be considered perfectly permissible, as no names would be mentioned:
“A New Jersey Port, December 23. – A soldier belonging to the ———th Regiment, which is quartered here temporarily preparatory to embarkation for a Pennsylvania port, was arrested last night for attempting to pass some Continental money. He was freed on bail on his promise to leave New Jersey with his regiment to-night.”
“A New Jersey Port, December 23. – Two British spy suspects were arrested in the barred zone along the water-front this morning, charged with peddling milk without a license. They were questioned by officers in charge concerning their knowledge of the intended movements of certain troops across a certain river, and, although they protested that they knew nothing of the matter, this fact in itself was considered suspicious, as there was no reason why they shouldn’t know, and they were therefore interned.”
And by the time everything was ready for the crossing, no one would be in the dark about it except the men who were to cross, and their relatives at home. The British, incidentally, would have been on the opposite shore waiting for them, wearing badges labelled “Reception Committee.”
On the whole, it seems lucky that General Washington and the rest of the Boys in Buff handled their own publicity by releasing news to the enemy and to the public at the same time, and letting Nature take its course. It has made history much more intimate.
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PREV TOC INDEX NEXT
Why Does Nobody
Collect Me?
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Some months ago, while going through an old box of books looking for a pressed nasturtium, I came across a thin volume which, even to my dreamers instinct, seemed worth holding out, if only for purposes of prestige.
It was a first edition of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our time, the edition brought out in Paris by the Three Mountains Press in 1924, while Hemingway was just “Old Ernie” who lived over the sawmill in the rue Notre Dame des Champs. I knew that it must be worth saving, because it said in the front that the edition consisted of one hundred and seventy copies, of which mine was Number Thirty-nine. That usually means something.
It so happened that, a few weeks later, “Old Ernie” himself was using my room in New York as a hide-out from literary columnists and reporters during one of his stopover visits between Africa and Key West. On such all-too-rare occasions he lends an air of virility to my dainty apartment which I miss sorely after he has gone and the furniture has been repaired.
More to interrupt his lion-hunting story than anything else, I brought out my copy of In Our Time and suggested that, in memory of happy days around the Anise Deloso bowl at the Closerie des Lilas, it might be the handsome thing for him to inscribe a few pally sentiments on the fly-leaf. Not, as I took pains to explain to him, that I was a particular admirer of his work, so much as that I wanted to see if he really knew how to spell.
Encouraged by my obviously friendly tone, he took a pen in his chubby fist, dipped it in a bottle of bull’s blood, and wrote the following:
To Robert (“Garbage Bird”) Benchley,hoping that he won’t wait for prices to reach the peak – From his friend,Ernest (“********”) Hemingway
The “Garbage Bird” reference in connection with me was a familiarity he had taken in the past to describe my appearance in the early morning light of Montparnasse on certain occasions. The epithet applied to himself, which was unprintable except in Ulysses, was written deliberately to make it impossible for me to cash in on the book.
Then, crazed with success at defacing In Our Time, he took my first edition of A Farewell to Arms and filled in each blank in the text where Scribners had blushed and put a dash instead of the original word. I think that he supplied the original word in every case. In fact, I am sure of it.
On the fly-leaf of this he wrote:
To R. (G.) B. from E. (***). H.
Corrected edition. Filled-in blanks. Very valuable. Sell quick.
Now, oddly enough, I had never considered selling either book. I had known, in a general way, that a first edition of the Gutenberg Bible would be worth money, and that, if one could lay hands on an autographed copy of Canterbury Tales, it would be a good idea to tuck it away, but that a first edition of one of Ernie’s books could be the object of even Rabelaisian jesting as to its commercial value surprised and, in a vague sort of way, depressed me. Why are not my works matters for competitive bidding in the open market?
I am older than Hemingway, and have written more books than he has. And yet it is as much as my publishers and I can do to get people to pay even the list-price for my books, to say nothing of a supplementary sum for rare copies. One of my works, Love Conquers All, is even out of print, and yet nobody shows any interest in my extra copy. I have even found autographed copies of my books in secondhand book shops, along with My Life and Times by Buffalo Bill. Doesn’t anybody care?
What is there about me and my work that repels collectors? I am handsome, in an unusual sort of way, and speak French fluently, even interspersing some of my writings with French phrases. True, some of my copy, as it goes to the printer, is not strictly orthodox in spelling and punctuation, but the proofreaders have always been very nice about it, and, by the time my books are out, there is nothing offensive to the eye about them. And yet I have been told by hospital authorities that more copies of my works are left behind by departing patients than those of any other author. It does seem as if people might at least take my books home with them.
If it is rarity which counts in the value of a book, I have dozens of very rare Benchley items in my room which I know cannot b
e duplicated. For the benefit of collectors, I will list them, leaving the price more or less up to the would-be purchaser. All that I ask is that I don’t actually lose money on the sale.
There is a copy of my first book, Of All Things, issued by Henry Holt in 1922. (Mr. Lincoln MacVeagh, who engineered the deal, is now Ambassador to Greece, which ought to count for something.) It is a first edition, an author’s copy, in fact, and has a genuine tumbler-ring on the cover. I have no doubt that it is actually the first volume of mine ever to be issued, and, as Of All Things has gradually gone into twelve editions since, it ought to be very valuable. Page 29 is dog-eared.
Love Conquers All (Holt-1923) is, as I have said, now out of print, which makes my extra copy almost unique. I doubt very much if any one else has an extra copy of Love Conquers All. It is a third edition, which may detract a little from its market value, but this is compensated for by the fact that it belonged originally to Dorothy Parker, who left it at my house five or six years ago and has never felt the need for picking it up. So, you see, it is really a Dorothy Parker item, too.
Pluck and Luck (Holt-1924) was brought out later in a dollar edition for drugstore sale, and I have three of those in a fair state of preservation. One of them is a very interesting find for collectors, as I had started to inscribe it to Donald Ogden Stewart and then realized that I had spelled the name “Stuart,” necessitating the abandonment of the whole venture. It is practically certain that there is not another dollar edition of Pluck and Luck with Donald Ogden Stewart’s name spelled “Stuart” on the fly-leaf. Would a dollar and a quarter be too much to ask, do you think?
Faulty inscriptions account for most of the extra copies of The Early Worm (Holt-1926) that I have, lying about. It was during that period, and that of my next book, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, or David Copperfield (Holt-1928) that I went through a phase of trying to write humorous remarks on the fly-leaves of gift-copies. Those copies in which the remarks did not turn out to be so humorous as I had planned had to be put aside. I have eighteen or twenty of these discarded copies, each with an inscription which is either unfunny or misspelled.
During what I call “my transitional period,” when I changed from Henry Holt to Harper’s and began putting on weight, I was moody and fretful, and so did not feel like trying to make wisecracks in my inscriptions. The recipient of a book was lucky if I even took the trouble to write his name in it. He was lucky, indeed, if he could read my name, for it was then that I was bullied into autographing copies at bookshop teas (this was my transitional period, you must remember, and I was not myself), and my handwriting deteriorated into a mere series of wavy lines, like static.
For this reason, I have not so many curious copies of The Treasurer’s Report and No Poems hanging about. I have, however, a dummy of The Treasurer’s Report with each page blank, and many of my friends insist that it should be worth much more than the final product. I don’t know just how dummy-copies rate as collectors’ items, but I will be very glad to copy the entire text into it longhand for fifty dollars. Thirty-five dollars, then.
And now I come to what I consider the choicest item of them all – one which would shape up rather impressively in a glass case a hundred years from now. It is a complete set of corrected galleys for my next book (to be called, I am afraid, From Bed to Worse) which I had cut up for rearrangement before I realized that I was cutting up the wrong set of proofs – the one that the printer wants back. I haven’t broken the news to the printer at Harper’s, and I may never get up the courage to do so (printers get so cross), in which case the book will never come out at all. Would that be a valuable piece of property or not – a set of hand-corrected galleys for a Benchley item which never was published? And all cut up into little sections, too! A veritable treasure, I would call it, although possibly the words might come better from somebody else.
But, until the collecting public comes to its senses, I seem to be saddled, not only with a set of mutilated galleys, but about twenty-five rare copies of my earlier works, each unique in its way. Possibly Hemingway would like them in return for the two books of his own that he has gone to so much trouble to render unsalable for me.
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PREV TOC INDEX .......
* * *
Index of Titles
* * *
A • B • C • D • E • F • G • H • I • J • K • L • M • N • O • P • Q • R • S • T • U • V • W • Y
* * *
A
À Bas the Military Censor
Advice to Gangsters
Are You an Old Master?
Art Revolution No. 4861
TOP
B
Bayeux Christmas Presents Early
Belated Tribute, A
Bird Lore
Books and Other Things
Boost New York!
Brain-Fag
Browsing Through the Passport
TOP
C
Confession
Correspondent-School Linguist, The
TOP
D
Dear Dead Table d’Hôte Days, The
Ding-Dong, School Bells
Do I Hear Twenty Thousand?
Doing Your Bit in the Garden
Down in Front
Dying Thesaurus, The
TOP
E
Encore
TOP
F
First Pigeon of Spring, The
Future Man: Tree or Mammal?
TOP
G
“Good Luck”
Good Luck, and Try and Get It
“Greetings From—”
TOP
H
“He Travels Fastest—”
Hey, Waiter!
Home Sweet Home
How to Get Things Done
How to Travel in Peace
TOP
I
Imagination In The Bathroom
In the Beginning
Inter-Office Memo
TOP
J
TOP
K
Knowing the Flowers
TOP
L
Last of the Heath Hens, The
Learn to Write
Letter Box, The
Literary Notes
Looking at Picture Books
Lure of the Rod, The
TOP
M
Mea Culpa
Memoirs
Menace of Buttered Toast, The
Morale in Banking
Music Heavenly Maid
My Five- (Or Maybe Six-) Year Plan
My Own Arrangement
My Subconscious
Mysteries of Radio, The
TOP
N
New Bone-Dust Theory of Behavior, The
TOP
O
Old Days in New Bottles
On or Before March 15
On Saying Little at Great Length
“One Hundred Years Ago Today—”
TOP
P
Perfect Audience, The
Perrine’s Return
Picking French Pastry, a Harder Game than Chess
Plans for Eclipse Day
Professional Pride
TOP
Q
Questionnaire Craze, The
TOP
R
TOP
S
“Safety Second”
So You’re Going to New York
Sporting Life: Dozing
Sporting Life: Following the Porter
Sporting Life: Turkish Bathing
Sporting Life: Watching
TOP
T
Take a Letter, Please
Tiptoeing Down Memory Lane
TOP
U
United States Senate Chamber, The
TOP
V
Vox Populi
TOP
W
Warning
Note in The Matter of Preparedness, A
What Time Is It?
Why Does Nobody Collect Me?
“Why I Am Pale”
Word About Hay Fever, A
Writers’ Code, A
“Writers— Right Or Wrong!”
TOP
Y
Your Boy and His Dog
Your Change
TOP
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Chips Off the Old Benchley Page 26