
Luke Batterham
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Senior Valuer
'DICKEY DICKEY LISTEN TO THE WORDS AS THEY TUMBLE OFF YOUR WISE AUNTIE'S PEN': stream-of-consciousness advice to a child from Gertrude Stein (advice not all that dissimilar to the aperçus to be found six years later in Tender Buttons, such as: 'A steady cake, any steady cake is perfect and not plain, any steady cake has a mounting reason and more than that it has singular crusts. A season of more is a season that is instead. A season of many is not more a season than most').
Gertrude Stein had moved from Baltimore to Paris, where she established her celebrated salon, in 1902. The letter's recipient, Hortense Guggenheimer, was a cousin of Gertrude's intimate friend the collector Etta Cone of Baltimore, with whom Hortense travelled to Europe at the same time as Gertrude and her brother Leo; indeed, Hortense and Etta arrived in Paris to find that Gertrude and Leo had got there only an hour before. The following year Hortense married Judge Jacob Moses of Baltimore, thereafter becoming active in charitable Jewish organizations, and died in 1918.