Yarnall correspondence about Spender

Here is a link  to the correspondence surrounding the Spender ms (from the Vertical File at the Lilly).  Note that these files are low-res!

1,  An exchange of letters between David Randall, Librarian of the Lilly Library, and John Yarnall, a former client of Randall's when he worked for Scribner's Book Store in New York (where he acquired books for J.K. Lilly).   Yarnall, an English Professor at Montgomery College (http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-1211321.html) had apparently purchased the Spender ms. originally from Randall (along with other items, including Woolf etc.) and Randall, in 1964, wanted to buy these items back, in order to build a decent modern collection for the Lilly.  He did so for $2,500 (which doesn't seem like all that much, given the other items that were also included).  The correspondence with Yarnall is the source of the statement that these poems were sent to a "traveling companion."   Yarnall also mentions having been asked to edit the poems but apparently he decided to sell them instead. 

2. I also included Spender's letters to Yarnall from the Lilly's English literature mss. On 143 March 1964, Spender writes:  "I have only just now got your letter of Feb. 14.  I am quite willing for you to sell the MS to the Lilly Library (as you are perfectly entitled to do) but I do think I should look at it before agreeing to to the poems to be printed.  I shall be at c/o English Dept. Northwestern University Evanston Illinois from April 4 - June 15.  Please could you send me the book to look at some time in those weeks, then I will let you know whether they seem at all publishable?"    He does send a follow-up letter, apparently after first misplacing the book since he thought these were poems someone had sent him for review (a collector's nightmare), in which he says he found them "not as bad as I feared" (Aug. 14, 1964).  He also wonders what precisely Yarnall wanted to do with them.