Above, a rare letter by Walt Disney, featured on Letters of Note, a neat blog that gathers and sorts fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos. Shaun Usher, the guy who runs Letters of Note, wants to produce a book.
A Letters of Note book. A beautifully bound, satisfyingly weighty book filled with many of the website’s best letters, plus a selection previously unseen. It will be lovingly made using thick, uncoated paper — the perfect material on which to print reproductions of such amazing correspondence. As with this website, each image will be accompanied by an introduction and a faithful transcription.
The letter collection includes:
• Hunter S. Thompson’s furious memo to a film executive that starts ‘Listen, you lazy bitch…’• Steve Martin’s ‘personalised’ form letter to a fan
• The letter of a Kamikaze pilot to his two young children, written the night before his mission
• A 9th century form letter from China used to apologise for having drunk too much at a dinner party
• A memo about some of the surprising candidates for Star Trek: The next generation
William Safire’s memo containing a speech for president Nixon to deliver if the Apollo 11 mission failed and the astronauts were lost.• A heartbreaking series of letters from a 31 year-old women with dementia desperately trying to contact her husband from a German asylum in 1909
• Aldous Huxley’s wife Laura giving a moving account of her husband’s death to his brother Julian in 1963
• A fan letter from Stanley Kubrick to Ingmar Bergman in 1960
• A letter from Albert Einstein to a theologian describing God as a ‘human weakness’
• The remarkably polite correspondence between Marge Simpson and former First Lady, Barbara Bush
There’s a wonderful “pitch video” here at Unbound. Read more about the project, and pledge your support if you, like me, dig it.
Like Walt says in the letter above, don’t hesitate! Do it now. Incidentally, the Disney letter above sold for $247,800.00 in May of this year. I don’t know how much the Letters of Note book will sell for, but it’ll be less than that.