A file of 12 Typed Letters Signed and 2 Typed Notes Signed to the publisher Victor Gollancz Ltd. (all but one to Gollancz himself), who issued Ford's memoir 'Return to Yesterday' in November 1931

From the Bart Auerbach Collection. 14 pages, all but one quarto in size and all but one single-spaced; written from Paris and Toulon, 23 February 1931 to 27 January 1932, the correspondence relating to the book and its publication, etc.; one letter with marginal fraying, another a bit wrinkled, and another with a marginal tear. The letter of 8 November 1931 is published -- from a carbon copy in the Ford archive - in Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. R. M. Ludwig, Princeton University Press, 1965, pp. 202-3. A portion of another letter (of 10 May 1931) is printed in David Dow Harvey, Ford Madox Ford ... a Bibliography, New York, 1972, p. 75; Harvey also prints a total of three sentences from two other letters on pp. 75 and 77.

WITH: (1) The contract for Return to Yesterday, 4 pp., folio, signed by Ford and a Gollancz representative, 30 March 1931; (2) A handwritten sheet by someone at Gollancz, 1 p., 4to, listing publication date, sales numbers and royalty payments for the book (apparently through 1931); (3) Carbon copies of nearly all of the publisher's replies to Ford's letters, written by a variety of representatives of the firm (a number of these replies browned with edges chipped, etc.).

AND WITH: Letters from scholars, bibliographers, and biographers, etc., of Ford, mostly requesting permission to publish extracts from Return to Yesterday or to use the correspondence in the Gollancz file: a total of approx. 26 letters (including a few notes) . Correspondents include Violet Hunt Hueffer (ALS, 4 pp., explaining that Ford is not really her husband), Arthur Mizener (2 letters), D. D. Harvey (4), Frank MacShane (4), R. M. Ludwig (1), D. H. Mitchell (2, from Buckingham Palace, regarding a negative paragraph about King George that should be removed from the book). Return to Yesterday includes engaging and informative accounts of Ford's literary collaboration with Conrad, of Stephen Crane's last years in England, and of Henry James home at Rye. (BA).