1973 Roald Dahl Letters & Poem
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GUEST:
45 years ago, when I was a children's librarian in Michigan, I initiated a program with the children of writing to famous authors that they liked. And I also wrote to those authors myself. And you are looking at some examples of responses that I received from, in this case, Roald Dahl, who is the author of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," among other books.
APPRAISER:
These letters were written between late 1972 and early 1973. Not long after "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" had first been published.
GUEST:
Yes.
APPRAISER:
And the archive is basically talking about some reviews that he had gotten from a publisher.
GUEST:
Yes, that's correct.
APPRAISER:
Roald Dahl is one of the greatest and wickedest children authors out there.
GUEST (laughing): Yes, indeed.
APPRAISER:
And just the text of some of these letters, kind of biting humor from time to time. And you can really feel his personal touch in many of these. And in one of them, he has an extra poem here about Miranda Mary Piker.
GUEST:
Yes.
APPRAISER:
Now, he took out a bunch of the children from the "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" story. I guess the editors wanted to make a shorter book, so he removed several of the characters…
GUEST:
Yes.
APPRAISER:
And one of them was Mary Miranda Piker. And what you have written here is the Oompa Loompa song that'd be sung after every naughty child met their horrible demise.
GUEST:
Yes.
APPRAISER:
Now, there's a version of the Mary Piker poem in the archives that has a few different words. For example, rather than saying "crunchy," it says "tasty," and then a couple other variations out there. The version that eventually got published in 2005 by The London Times did include it as "how crunchy and how good."
(laughs)
APPRAISER:
This particular archive, I would give it an auction estimate of $2,500 to $3,500.
GUEST:
Whoa. That's amazing.
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