November 18 Friday – Estimated to be this day or just before, Andrew Chatto answered Sam’s Nov. 13 “scheme” about a special, limited, expensive edition of “Omar’s Old Age,” which was to be referred to in correspondence as “ABC”:

As a scathing satire on the crazy literary taste of today I consider the ABC a work of great genius—But in all my experience I have never known a case in which the writer of works of like inspiration did not at some time in after life regret the printing of them.

It would be an easy matter of course for us at a moderate expense to have such a brochure set up in Edition de Luxe for private circulation amongst a select few limited to say 30 copies which number I think could be distributed amongst collectors at perhaps £10, to £20 each, but I fancy that $1000 or £200 would only be paid by those friends who wish to raise a subscription to the author. The worst of the matter is that all the press men would expect free copies! [Welland 196].

Note: Welland asserts Sam answered “immediately” (on Nov. 19); and the fact that Chatto did not, as Sam requested, burn the MS, “indicates that he was certainly neither shocked nor offended by it; his retention of it in the firm’s safe suggests that he and Spalding enjoyed the joke, thought it too good to destroy, and then forgot it” [ibid]. See Nov. 13.