What you hear about Laura Ingalls Wilder is that she wrote her manuscripts “on lined school tablets in soft pencil.” She also wrote on the backs of envelopes, insides of greeting cards, mostly blank order forms, and what seems like whatever else had been saved because of its white spaces. I’m pretty sure I’ve blogged about this before.
There were two recycled scraps in the manuscripts for Little House on the Prairie that I found interesting. One was the inside of an undated Christmas card from “Mr. and Mrs. Frink.” I know that the Wilders were friends with the Frinks, but it was interesting to see that the handwritten greeting was signed the way it was, not with their given names (which were Harvey and Emma, by the way).
On another page – upside down – was the following: “Uncle Hosie: The Yankee Salesman, Phillips H. Lord, for Manly.” Uncle Hosie was written by Lord and published by Simon & Schuster in 1930. It’s about a salesman from Maine who “sells things nobody wants to buy.” Was this a note to remind Laura to buy the book for Almanzo? To check it out of the library for him? That he wanted to read it, or that someone else wanted him to?
