America's Etiquette Expert Emily Post Pens Notes, Letters About Her Books

EMILY POST (1872 - 1960) was an American author, novelist and socialite, famous for writing about etiquette. Post grew up in a wealthy family. She began to write once her sons were old enough to attend boarding school. Her early work included humorous travel books, newspaper articles on architecture and interior design and magazine serials for Harper’s, Scribner’s, and The Century. She wrote five novels.   Post wrote her first etiquette book, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home. It became a best-seller with numerous editions over the following decades.   Post died in New York City in 1968 and is buried in the cemetery at St. Mary’s-in-Tuxedo Episcopal Church in Tuxedo Park, New York.

Offering signed notes and letters by Post to her friend Mrs. Helen Watson Boteler of Long Island, New York, with very good content, as follows:

TLS, one page, December 12, 1939, on Post’s stationary. “Thank you very much for sending me the pictures. I am delighted to have them and think you were very generous to send them and write me.

“I have no idea what a ‘Candlelight-at-seven’ means. I think it must be a Kentucky custom.”

Four-page ALS to Boteler on Edgartown, Massachusetts stationary with specific references to Etiquette and stating that The Personality of A House is “much, much my favorite book of all I’ve written.”

“Thank you so much for liking us (all) on the radio. We have had a very happy winter together and feel badly that the ‘column’ is gone...Ordinarily when someone says thank you...you say ‘It was nothing at all’ or Oh, not at all’ or ‘You’re very welcome’...About silver: How many of us have exactly the silver we would choose if we might? [Those of us (not you) married over 25 years ago have either discarded the promise or set one’s tables with lamps. Viz: page 168 Etiquette, even page 172...Genuine George III is ornate and already the Tea ? looks heavy...”  With cover and postmark from Edgartown, Mass.

One short, initialed manuscript note signed and attached to a promotional flier for Post’s The Personality of a House: The Blue Book of Home Charm, Funk & Wagnalls (c. 1930), which she calls her “favorite book of all I’ve written.  The note is pasted to the inside edge and folded over in the 4-page pamphlet advertising her book.

Letters are in excellent condition with expected age toning. Small edge splits to the pamphlet. Else very good.

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