431 Stevens st.
cor West.
Camden, [N. J.]
Dec. 29, '73.
A. K. Butts,1
Dear Sir,
Yours of 26th rec'd. It looks like something beginning to be done. About Piper's2 bill you can wait till you go personally to Boston.
I have written to O'Kane3 to–day, & I hope you will
have no further difficulty in getting the books—I have requested him to send word to
you to come & get them. If we get started in the way we talked of, (& I have no
doubt we shall,) & satisfaction is felt on both sides, it is certainly my intention that
you shall have actual & complete control of the sales—& all supplies.
Notes
- 1. A New York bookseller at 39 Dey Street.
Whitman was having difficulties—real or imaginary, as his mother might
have said—with booksellers. When Whitman wrote this letter, he had decided
to let Butts, as he said, "have actual & complete control of the sales."
Commenting on one of the letters of Butts, Whitman observed to Horace Traubel in
1889: "What a sweat I used to be in all the time . . . over getting my damned
books published! When I look back at it I wonder I didn't somewhere or other on
the road chuck the whole business into oblivion" (With Walt
Whitman in Camden [1906–1996], 3:561). Butts went bankrupt in 1874. [back]
- 2. The Boston agents for Whitman's books; see
also Whitman's December 8, 1871 letter to W. H.
Piper & Co. Evidently Piper settled the bill in February; see Whitman's February 13, 1874 letter to Peter Doyle, in which
he noted the receipt of "a check paying a debt due me a long time, & which I
had quite given up." [back]
- 3. For Thomas O'Kane, a New York book dealer,
see Whitman's September 13, 1873 letter. The
letter to O'Kane is not known. [back]