Manuscripts and Their Authors
But the conviction is general among the amateur authors of unsolicited manuscripts that the editors or publishers to whom they send their literary wares are morally bound not only to examine them, but to read them carefully from beginning to end. They sometimes resort to ingenious devices by way of detecting the rascally editors in neglect of this duty. They slenderly stick the corners of two sheets together; or they turn up the lower corner of a sheet here and there as if by accident but so carefully as to cover a word or two from sight; or they place a sheet upside down, or in some other way set a trap that makes the editor smile if he happens to be in good temper, and causes him to reject the thing in resentment of the impertinence if his breakfast has not agreed with him that day.
I was speaking of these things one day, to Mr. George P. Putnam, Irving's friend and the most sympathetically literary of publishers then living, when he suddenly asked me:
"Do you know the minimum value of a lost manuscript?"
I professed ignorance, whereupon he said:
"It is five hundred dollars." Presently, in answer to a question, he explained:
"In the old days of Putnam's Monthly, one of the multitude of unsolicited manuscripts sent in would now and then be mislaid. I never knew a case of the kind in which the author failed to value the manuscript at five hundred dollars or more, no matter what its subject or its length or even its worthlessness might be. In one case, when I refused to pay the price fixed upon by the author, he instituted suit, and very earnestly protested that his manuscript was worth far more than the five hundred dollars demanded for it. He even wrote me that he had a definite offer of more than that sum for it. To his discomfiture somebody in the office found the manuscript about that time and we returned it to the author. He sent it back, asking us to accept it. I declined. He then offered it for two hundred and fifty dollars, then for two hundred, and finally for seventy-five. I wrote to him that he needn't trouble to reduce his price further, as the editors did not care to accept the paper at any price. I have often wondered why he didn't sell it to the person who, as he asserted, had offered him more than five hundred dollars for it; but he never did, as the thing has never yet been published, and that was many years ago."
XLVI
It was during my connection with Hearth and Home that I first met two men who greatly interested me. One of them was the newest of celebrities in American literature; the other was old enough to have been lampooned by Poe in his series of papers called "The Literati."