A small archive of correspondence and related material between poet and Tufts professor John Holmes and Pittsburgh engineer Oliver Kenneth Wrigley around publishing Wrigley's manuscript Fifty Thousand Rhyming Words
Pittsburgh / Somerville, Massachusetts: 1935-1938. A collection of 31 letters and related items documenting Oliver Kenneth Wrigley's prolonged effort to publish his ambitious Fifty Thousand Rhyming Words, and the remarkable assistance given him by the poet, critic, and Tufts professor John Holmes (1904–1962). Extending from Wrigley's preliminary market research in 1935 through repeated submissions to major American and British publishing houses from 1936–38, the archive provides an unusually detailed record of the development, revision, and attempted publication of a large-scale reference work on rhyme and pronunciation. At its center is Holmes, who initially examined Wrigley's manuscript as a poet and teacher of versification but soon became its energetic—and occasionally exasperated—unofficial literary agent, personally carrying the manuscript to publishers, arguing for its commercial and scholarly value, soliciting editorial opinions, and advising Wrigley on extensive revisions.
Wrigley's project was formidable. An early 1935 description calls for a work of approximately 1,000 pages containing more than 112,000 entries arranged into 4,680 groups and numerous subgroups. By March 1938 he had radically revised and compressed it: the new version, Fifty Thousand Rhyming Words, comprised approximately 500 pages and some 2,000 additional entries beyond the earlier edition, with a sound index intended to allow words to be located by vowel sound rather than spelling. The archive begins before Holmes's involvement with Wrigley's correspondence concerning the prospective market for such a reference work, including his March 1935 inquiry to the Poetry Society of America and a substantial reply from poet and Society secretary Margery Mansfield, followed by Wrigley's letter explaining the scale, organization, and intended market of his proposed dictionary.
Holmes entered the project in late 1936 after being shown the manuscript by John Sheldon. His reaction was enthusiastic: as a poet and teacher of versification, he considered Wrigley's method sensible and the book potentially valuable, although he immediately raised questions about the classification of words whose pronunciation varied regionally. From there Holmes assumed an extraordinary degree of responsibility for a project that was not his own. Over the next two years he approached Henry Holt, Houghton Mifflin, Little, Brown, Oxford University Press, and Grosset, personally delivering the cumbersome manuscript when possible and using his literary and publishing connections on Wrigley's behalf. The correspondence consequently records not merely a succession of rejection letters but the actual reasoning behind publishers' decisions—the expense of manufacturing a large reference book, estimates of the number of copies required to recover production costs, the limited sales of competing rhyming dictionaries, library demand, pricing, royalties, and the difficulty of persuading publishers to invest in a specialized work whose sales might accumulate only gradually.
The letters are particularly revealing of the relationship between the two men. Holmes repeatedly apologizes for delays, reports conversations with editors, critiques Wrigley's phonetic classifications, recommends revisions and reductions, and continues seeking new outlets after successive disappointments. His letters are informal, candid, and frequently humorous about the publishing trade. After Little, Brown rejected the revised manuscript despite initial editorial approval because existing rhyming dictionaries were selling only about two copies per month, Holmes observed that “publishing must be having a very bad stomach-ache.” Yet he persisted, taking the manuscript to Oxford and offering to enlist Donald Grosset personally. The correspondence culminates during the summer of 1938, when Holmes writes from Robert Frost's farm in South Shaftsbury, Vermont, where he was staying with his family and spending his days “walking and talking” with Frost, while continuing to strategize about Wrigley's book. The Frost association is particularly evocative given Holmes's own close friendship with the poet and his position within the New England literary community.
Taken together, the papers offer an unusually complete case study in the creation and attempted publication of an ambitious Depression-era reference book, documenting the project from market research and technical development through revision, editorial evaluation, sales analysis, and repeated rejection. At the same time, they provide a particularly appealing example of Holmes's generosity toward another writer. What began as an examination of an unfamiliar man's rhyming dictionary developed into a two-year campaign in which an established poet repeatedly placed his own time, reputation, publishing contacts, and practical knowledge at Wrigley's disposal.
Although Fifty Thousand Rhyming Words apparently never reached publication, the survival of this correspondence preserves in unusual detail both the history of the lost project and the literary friendship that grew around it.
John Albert Holmes Jr. (1904–1962) was an American poet, critic, and influential teacher of poetry. Born in Somerville, Massachusetts, he graduated from Tufts in 1929, studied at Harvard, taught briefly at Lafayette College, and returned to Tufts in 1934, remaining there for the rest of his career. He published seven collections of poetry as well as The Poet's Work (1939) and Writing Poetry (1960), and became an important mentor to a generation of American poets. His students and workshop participants included John Ciardi, Richard Wilbur, May Sarton, Richard Eberhardt, Maxine Kumin, Anne Sexton, and George Starbuck; he was also closely associated with Robert Frost and other leading New England poets. Tufts's extensive John Holmes archive emphasizes both his prolific correspondence and his unusual commitment to encouraging other writers—qualities exceptionally well illustrated by the present archive.
Oliver Kenneth Wrigley (1905–1978) was a Canadian-born engineer, compiler, and later instructor in public speaking. Born July 28, 1905, in Thorold Township, Ontario, he immigrated to the United States as a child and by the 1930s was living in Pittsburgh, where he worked for Jones & Laughlin Steel and spent several years developing Fifty Thousand Rhyming Words. Wrigley married Elizabeth Springer in 1936; he subsequently worked as an engineer for U.S. Steel, whose transfer of him to California brought the couple to Los Angeles in 1944. Elizabeth Wrigley would have a distinguished career of her own as the longtime director of the Francis Bacon Library. By the early 1950s O. Kenneth Wrigley was conducting the “Wrigley Course in Effective Speaking” in Pasadena. That later vocation provides an intriguing context for the intense concern with phonetics, pronunciation, accent, and spoken sound evident in his earlier rhyming dictionary.
The archive consists of 17 TLS from Holmes to Wrigley, most of them on Holmes' printed letterhead; 5 TLs or carbon copies from Wrigley to Holmes; a 1938 Christmas broadside featuring Holmes poem, "The Place of Light," published in the Yale Review, Summer 1937; four pages of typescript research material in preparation for Holmes' book The Poet's Work, which he apparently sent to Wrigley to review (Wrigley has penciled a message to Holmes at the top returning the material; a TLS from an editor at Little Brown to Holmes rejecting Wrigley's book; a TLS from P. Kennedy at Houghton Mifflin to Holmes rejecting Wrigley's work; TL from Wrigley the Poetry Society of America; 3-page TLS response from Mansfield to Wrigley with handwritten corrections; Wrigley's typed response to Mansfield. Item #15327
Price: $1,200.00