On behalf of the entire editorial collective at t&p I’d like to thank Brian Sholis for launching Today in Letters, his splendidly addictive blog-based undertaking, which each day offers a fresh letter or diary entry from this day in literary history. We plan to add it to the list of “links we like” at right, to keep company with the equally appealing Pepys’ Diary project, now in its 5th year.

To show just how much we are taken with the whole Today in Letters idea, we plunged into the revised edition of the Letters of E. B. White, which had been waiting near the top of our “To Be Read” pile since Christmas, asking quite brazenly to be whisked away and plundered in some overstuffed armchair by the fire. Selected essentially at random from its pages, here is a letter dated sometime in January 1947, from E. B. White to Stanley Hart White, his older brother:

Dear Bun:

I’m glad to report that even now, at this late date, a blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me — more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a little red wagon. It holds all the hope there is, all fears. I can remember, really quite distinctly, looking a sheet of paper square in the eyes when I was seven or eight years old and thinking “This is where I belong, this is it.” Having dirtied up probably a quarter of a million of them and sent them down drains and through presses, I am exhausted but not done, faithful in my fashion, and fearful only that I will die before one comes out right — as though I had deflowered a quarter of a million virgins and was still expecting the perfect child. What is this terrible infatuation anyway? Some mild nervous disorder, probably, that compels a man to leave a fiery tail in his wake, like a ten-cent comet, or smell up a pissing post so that the next dog will know who’s been along. I have moments when I wish that I could either take a sheet of paper or leave it alone, and sometimes, in despair and vengeance, I just fold them into airplanes and sail them out of high windows, hoping to get rid of them that way, only to have an updraft (or a change of temper) bring them back in again. As for your gift of so many sheets of white bond, with rag content, I accept them in the spirit with which they were sent and shall write you a book. It will be the Greatest Book that has Ever Been Written. They all are, in the early wonderful stage before the first word gets slid into place.

Happy New Year!
En