A Day Like This

4 May 1923

AE HOUSMAN, author of A Shropshire Lad, writes to his publisher, Grant Richards: 'My dear, old, and intimate friend Princess Marie Louise, who is furnishing the Queen's doll's house, asked me some months ago to let 12 poems of mine be copied small to form one volume in the library; and I selected the 12 shortest and simplest and least likely to fatigue the attention of dolls or members of the illustrious House of Hanover. Now she says there is to be printed a book describing or reproducing the contents of this library, and asks me to allow these poems to be included in it; and I have consented. So do not send a solicitor's letter to the Queen (for the book is to be hers) when it appears. The issue is to be 2,000 copies in this country, and the Queen is to do what she likes with the proceeds. As I say, the poems are my shortest, and the 12 together are 96 lines.'