Collections

[Bierce declines a guided tour of Silver Lakedue to his poor health and continues by teasing Belle about her younger sister, "I'm thinking seriously of transferring my love from Hattie to you. You don't move away without notice, and -well, your mother's right in worrying about Hattie. That girl needs a convent worse than Selma -a convent with more austere 'sisters' and higher walls, topped with broken glass. A sentinel with a repeating rifle might be added."]

[replying to Blythe's letter of the sixth, Bierce informs him that he has not written any fiction recently and has "uniformly declined to write for the magazines, being dissatisfied with the indefinite character of their proposals and the uncertainty as to when the work if accepted will be published." He goes on to admit that the Cosmopolitan Magazinemay have a different system of publication than most magazines and declares it to be better than the majority of them]

[thanks Hubbard (1856-1915) for sending him a bound volume of The Philistine, a monthly magazine (1895-1915), and congratulates him on his success with the venture; Hubbard, an American inspirational essayist who published and edited The Philistine, saw its circulation increase from 2500 copies given away to 225,000 paid subscriptions]

[returns her "excellent verses" which she had enclosed in a letter to him under the misunderstanding that he had some editorial connection with the Cosmopolitan Magazine]

[Bierce writes to his friend, eventual biographer, and publisher of The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Walter Neale, thanking him for his explanation about Kaufman and his copyright lawyer, and mentioning the anger of the artist Miss Campbell over Neale's refusal to see her and the work she had done at his suggestion, "being an artist and a woman, she is naturally a bit sensitive. May I say anything to comfort her?"]

[Bierce quotes a long excerpt from a letter to him from S.O. Howe, the editor of his book, The Shadow on the Dial and Other Essays, published in San Franciscoby A.M. Robertsonin 1909, which makes arrangements for transferring the copyright for The Shadow on the Dial; Bierce also refers to waiting for a few page proofs]

[returns the proofs of volume seven of The Devil's Dictionary, approves of Neale's announcement of books undertaken in 1910, "A pretty ambitious project. They go a long way toward making my dream come true, namely, that you are to be `the foremost publisher in America,'" and rejoices that he has only three and a half volumes of page proofs yet to read, with a newsclipping about the growth of thin paper used in bookmaking glued on the third page below Bierce's signature], formerly tipped in along with a typed transcript in the front of a copy of In the Midst of Lifeby Ambrose Bierce(1898)

[Bierce writes in this partial letter, "I am not a `free agent' and can now (as my time is short) hope to see only a few even of those whom I most wish to see." He also warns that Sacramento" is bad for the heart -it used to be bad for mine."]

[Believes that all information on Ambrose Bierceand George Sterlinghe can offer is found in Mammouart; gives names of persons who might be of help.]