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Date
5-24-1951
Personal Name Recipient
Stanley L. West
Description
Letter from James Branch Cabell to Stanley L. West in which Cabell explains the origin of his horse figurine collection.
Transcription
Dear Mr. West:
As far back as in 1919, I started, for various reasons, to use upon the covers of my various books the Cabell crest, which happened to be the moralistic figure of a very much rampant male horse reassuringly bridled; and ever since 1919 I have employed this horse design as a sort of trade mark.
My collection of little horses, though, did not begin until early 1926, when it was more or less obviously suggested by a volume, The Silver Stallion, which I published during the April of that year. The thought then came to me that I liked the people about whom I had been writing, both because they diverted me and because they had provided for me a modest income; that they, in brief, were my friends; and that it is customary for friends to exchange gifts.
In return for the existence, howsoever ephemeral, which I had given to the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion -- so did my thinking continue -- each member of it not unbefittingly might have given to me in return some special token by which to remember him; this would, in logic, assume an equine form; and the aforesaid gratifying, if regrettably lean, income would pay for at any rate as many as seven small horses.
So then did I procure for myself a tiny horse to rank as a personal souvenir of each member of the fellowship who had figured in my book. And this tiny herd was increased all-naturally in 1927 by Gerald Musgrave, when I came to write concerning him in Something About Eve, inasmuch as he himself collected figurines of animals and of birds and of reptiles, and had ridden toward Antan upon the silver-tinted stallion which is called Kalki. This Gerald Musgrave, in short, afforded to me a small metal horse representing Kalki, and selected, it may be presumed, from Mr. Musgrave’s own collection.
Well! but ever since then I have followed the custom of allowing each leading character, whether fictitious or real, about whom I published anything in a book, or in magazine form, to provide me with an effigy of yet one more horse such as was fairly famous in legend, paid for punctiliously out of the proceeds of that which I had written as to him, or in some very few cases, as to her. And I have done this, I believe, upon sixty-three occasions.
That it was a childish performance, I admit; and were it all to do over again, I would plump for something rather more stalwart than are china horses. Their legs, as I have learned by repeated and vexing experience, are only too apt to get broken when you try to wash or to dust these fragile creatures; and the collection, in consequence, has acquired a few cripples as well as a vast number of gaps such as were formerly filled in by the sixty-three ungrudging donors to this collection, my now unrepresented friends.
--Which appears to be about all the explaining required of
Yours faithfully,
James Branch Cabell
24 May 1951
Personal Name Subject
Cabell, James Branch, 1879-1958; West, Stanley L., 1912-2001
Topical Subject
Horses; Figurines
City/Location
Richmond (Va.)
Genre
letters (correspondence)
Local Genre
text
Type
Text
Digital Format
application/pdf
Language
eng
Rights Statement URL
Rights
This material is protected by copyright, and the copyright is held by James Branch Cabell. You are permitted to use this material in any way that is permitted by copyright. Acknowledgment of Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries as a source is required.
Collection
James Branch Cabell Horse Figurine Collection
Source
Letter from James Branch Cabell to Stanley L. West, 1951 May 24, James Branch Cabell Horse Figurine collection, M 377, Box 1, Special Collections and Archives, James Branch Cabell Library, Virginia Commonwealth University.
File Name
m377_letters_01.pdf