Most people believe that when Eliot famously wrote that "April is the cruelest month" he was thinking of the IRS, but he may have had the Princeton faculty in mind. For following the April meeting of the board of trustees the University secretary sends us a letter telling us how much, or to put it another way how little, we will be paid the following year. This letter is the subject of my column, though I naturally approach it in a way that eschews all vulgar financial concerns and concentrates on the very hip humanistic topic of "the materiality of the book."
You do indeed find the strangest material things in books. As I had the occasion to point out a year or so ago in a different context, you will find pasted into the first volume of the Firestone's "Variorum Spenser" (3940.1032.v1) a letter to its onetime owner, Hamilton Cottier '22, appointing him as an instructor in English at Northwestern, beginning Sept. 1, 1930, at a salary of $2,800. Cottier is one of my many predecessors in the English department whose very name has vanished from the living memory of McCosh Hall, though it lives on in its associations with various bibliophilic projects and generous bibliographic benefactions.
I can understand why Cottier forced a physical union of the two texts that gave greatest meaning to his life. Where your heart is, there will your treasure be also. The Variorum Spenser was a noble typographic monument for its time. To be fair Cottier's letter of appointment itself is on a good quality letterhead with at least a suggestion of rag content, but I have to say that it looks like an ATM receipt when held up against the elegance of my own letter of appointment as assistant professor at Princeton, at a salary of $8,500, dated April 9, 1965. That letter, on such vellum as the Queen might use in offering preferment to an archbishop, is signed by Secretary Alexander Leitch '24. Leitch had many claims to fame. He was in his time the editor of the 'Prince.' When he signed my letter he was but a year away from retiring after 42 years in administrative service, a full 30 of them in the office of the secretary. Most famously he is the editor of "The Princeton Companion" — the book that should be a compulsory graduation present for every Princetonian.
The next secretary (1966-1974), my titular departmental colleague Jeremiah Finch, was like me a numberless non-Princetonian, but his stationery was of unparalleled magnificence. We called our April missives our "Tiffany letters," and as a general rule in those days the University's investment in salary increment must have been about the same as in the paper that announced it. Only under the recently ended secretariat of Thomas Wright '62 did material standards collapse. As the endowment trebled and salary increases occasionally reached four digits, the quality of secretarial stationery went all to hell. For the last decade it wasn't even the best quality University letterhead but some grade midway between latrine and photocopy in which you could smell the pinewoods. The secretary's signature resembled an earthworm casting. The rule seems to be: The better the dough, the worse the show.
The faculty face April in a state of subdued excitement, for we have a new Secretary: Robert Durkee '69, another 'Prince' editor, Woody-Woo, Quad. (Around here it's three strikes and you're vice-president.) But I already know what to expect. I have entered a program of phased retirement, which in industry features a "golden parachute" and in the Academy a parachute fashioned in Melmac or perhaps Masonite. A few weeks ago I got details in a letter from the secretary, a letter I could barely lift. Its thickness promised many valuable coupons for pizza and detergent, not to mention the car wash. But it proved to be a single sheet of laid paper, of roughly 300-pound weight, an elegant faint sorrel in color, in the fabric of which were embedded what appear to be a few flakes of Siberian gold. The secretary had the honor to inform me, etc., etc., that the trustees' animation at the prospect of my projected retirement was of such a character as to demand a new plateau of stationery elegance.
I have already glued the letter to the flyleaf of my Riverside Chaucer.
John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. His column appears on Mondays.
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