1988-1991. The file contains one typed letter signed and two autograph postcards signed from Bass, and two autograph postcards signed from Swift. Note that these letters are not to each other, but to their publisher about each other. Swift begins by saying he's impressed with Bass's The Watch and is forwarding it to his UK publisher, Penguin. (He's also on his way to Stockholm and Paris to publicize Out of this World, and hoping to meet Don DeLillo.) The second Swift note, a card, says Penguin "has bought Rick Bass for UK publication." Bass then types to his publisher with thanks for initiating the sale and expressing indirect gratitude to Swift. "I mean, how do you thank someone for that?...one morning I wake up with no English contract in sight, I'm out chopping wood, minding my own business, and the next day this deal floats down from heaven..." Bass also expresses some problems with his new electric typewriter and some dread about leaving Montana to teach in Texas, and he reports his social event for the week was a haircut. A postcard follows, which shows Bass with his wife and some fish he's caught (there is a publisher's notation here to add his "girlfriend's" name to Bass's rolodex card). There are several retained copies of letters to the two included, the most humorous of which is the publisher telling Swift that the Penguin offer "will allow [Bass] to come down from the ranch every once in a while and buy groceries instead of having to trap and kill them himself." A final, 1991 postcard from Bass agrees to the removal of a comma and adds (cryptically), "I still don't think my 'challenge' would make big stores drop the book, & might lure a bastard or 2 into picking it up." The lot is fine. An interesting glimpse of the informal "grapevine" of publishers and writers helping to get a young writer published and established. Nearly 40 years later, Bass is still living in the Montana wilderness and publishing books, mostly on the environment, to substantial critical acclaim. Swift, who was also a young writer at the time of these notes, not yet 40, is now something of an eminence grise of English letters. [#036669] $500