May 04, 2017 - Sale 2446

Sale 2446 - Lot 365

Price Realized: $ 1,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 700 - $ 1,000
EXPOUNDING UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL. Autograph Letter Signed, to journalist George Parsons Lathrop, declining to attend his meeting, and presenting an argument in favor of protecting literary works by international copyright. 3 pages, 8vo, written on a folded sheet; faint scattered staining, horizontal folds. (MRS) Boston, 27 April 1885
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". . . I cannot be present at the meeting where so many of my friends will be gathered. It will be a grand rally in the cause of one of the hardest worked of the labouring classes--a meeting of the soft-handed sons of toil, whose tasks are more trying than those of the roughest day laborer, though his palms might shame the hide of a rhinoceros. How complex, how difficult, is the work of the brain-operative! He employs the noblest implement which God has given to mortals. He handles the most precious material that is modelled by the art of man; the imperishable embodiment of human thought in language.
"Is not the product of the author's industry an addition to the wealth of his country and of civilization as much as if it were a ponderable or measurable substance? It cannot be weighed in the grocer's scales or measured by the shop keeper's yard-stick. But nothing is so real, nothing is so permanent, nothing of human origin so prized. . . .
". . . The British author whose stolen works are in the hands of the vast American reading public, may possibly receive a small pension if he came to want in his old age. But the bread of even public charity is apt to have a bitter taste, and the slice is at best but a small one. Shall not our English-writing brother have his fair day's wage for his fair day's work . . . ?
"As to the poor American author, no pension will ever keep him from dying in the poorhouse. His books may be on every stall in Europe in their own or in foreign tongues, but his only compensation is the free-will offering of some liberal-minded publisher. . . ."
On April 28 and 29, 1885, a number of authors met in New York at the Madison Square Theater to give readings of their works to benefit the American Copyright League, including Mark Twain, Henry Ward Beecher, Julian Hawthorne, and others.
Published in the Open Letters section of the July 1885 issue of The Century Magazine.