1

Permission of Librarian granted by letter 2/8/85 TM

Letterhead: EDMUND BERKELEY
42 CANTERBURY ROAD, BELLAIR
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA 22901

January 29, 1985

Mrs. Arnold Mignery
Archives Department
Jessie Ball duPont Library
The University of the South
Sewanee, Tennessee 37375

Dear Mrs. Mignery,

Our sporadic correspondence with you and your predecessors has covered such an extended period of time that Louise Ware has long since retired, and perhaps you may have done the same. I retired from teaching some years ago, but Dorothy and I continue with our research and writing. I apparently last communicated with you in December 1980. At that time we had given up attempting to find a publisher for our Curtis biography and had sent our manuscript to the Southern Historical Collection at Chapel Hill. You very kindly permitted us to send our copies of your letters there also.

You may well be surprised to learn that we have just, unexpectedly, found a publisher, and perhaps you may be even more surprised to learn that you are probably responsible for it! In November 1977 you put us in touch with Dr. Ronald H. Petersen. This led to a long and fruitful correspondence between us. You probably have a copy of his The Mycological Association of M. J. Berkeley and M. A. Curtis which was published for him in 1980 by J. Cramer of West Germany. He referred to our manuscript in his Foreword. He also wrote to Cramer suggesting that he publish it, and urged us to write to Cramer, for a variety of reasons we decided not to do so. Earlier this month we decided to write to Cramer, having learned from Peterson that he did not have to subsidize his book. I wrote, asking if Cramer would care to examine our manuscript, and we were somewhat astonished to have him reply that he would publish it at no expense to us, provided that he could begin work on it in February. If he could not he would have to postpone it for a year or more. You may imagine that we made a hasty drive to Chapel Hill last chilly weekend, retrieved the manuscript, had a copy made and sent the original by Federal Express to Cramer.

We have since been checking the copy for any quotes we had made which require permission to quote. Among these are several from your letters which I shall give below:

Curtis to Fairbanks, 29 July 1867: Curtis wrote that he was spending $50, instead of attending a meeting at Sewanee. He supposed that this might be "an imprudent act, as upon such terms my absence may be deemed more valuable than my presence." In discussing possible candidates for the Rectorship of the University, he wrote that before the war he had favored Dr. Henry Bar-