The Crown Octavos and Their Authors              25

was published in October 1957. iMargic sent the typescript off to
the printer and immediately departed on a visit to Japan. When she
returned she was horrified at the appearance of the book awaiting
her. It was printed on white paper and had cream endpapers which
Margie felt looked terrible. Not only that, but many of the books
were ink smudged, and she refused to accept a number of them,
returning them to the printer. She had no idea what happened to
these returned copies, but they were never replaced. Some time
later a water pipe in her office broke, and a number of the remain¬
ing copies were dampstained and had to be discarded. Small won¬
der then that this is one of the scarcer books in the series. iMargie
had no records of how many copies were actually signed and sold.

iMarianne Moore's publislier, like Robert Frost's, objected to
letting House of Books have a selection of poems as it would have
taken too much out of her next book, so once again a play was
published. The Absentee. It was issued in May 1962, almost five
years after the Welty volume. Margie said that she enjoyed work¬
ing with Miss Moore, "but siic always acted as if butter wouldn't
melt in her mouth, and I never knew anyone as astute about fi¬
nances in my life, never. It was all right, though, and I liked her
tremendously; she was a great person." Miss Moore took a large
part of the edition herself, to be used as place markers at a luncheon
given for her in Rochester.

The fifteenth book in the series wasn't solicited by House of
Books at all, but was offered to them by a friend of Tennessee Wil¬
liams who had at one time been his literary agent. Again, it didn't
fit into any collection that Williams planned, and he was looking
for a suitable place for permanent publication. It was a memoir of
Williams's grandmother in the guise of a short story called Grand,
and Margie published it in December 1964. Williams was the only
one of the Crown Octavos authors that Margie never met, and she
said she hadn't the slightest desire to do so.

The sixteenth and last of the Crown Octavos was Robert Dun¬
can's essay The Truth ir Life of Myth: An Essay in Essential