[Sidney Dark, journalist and author.] Autograph Letter Signed ('Sidney Dark') to Collin Brooks, editor of 'Truth', regarding an article he was asked to write at a 'very alcoholic Savage lunch'. With copy of Brooks's waggish response.

ONE: ALS from Dark to Brooks. The handwriting is quite atrocious, and the present transcription is at points tentative. Dark begins by recalling that at 'the delightful & very alcoholic Savage lunch' (i.e. lunch at the Savage Club), Brooks 'suggested that I should write an article for Truth. Perhaps because of the super-abundant alcoholic I have clean forgotten what the article was to he about. If you haven't & still want it, I might be able to write it.' The penultimate sentence is, to this cataloguer at least, indecipherable, apart from the words 'of course in a public sense'. The letter ends: 'I vastly enjoyed our lunch.' TWO: Carbon of Brooks's reply. 22 May 1947. 1p., 4to. A waggish response, beginning: 'The long delay in answering your letter was caused, as you may have guessed, by my suffering your own disability and not being able to recall the topic. I queried Reginald Pound, who said he would ask his sub-conscious to remind us all, but after some nights and days of effort his sub-conscious has failed to respond. I know it was something on which you expressed strong views but, as you have strong views on so many things, I have quite honestly forgotten what it was!' He asks him to 'take the twelve hundred words' and choose his own topic, adding, 'We are an open forum'. Dark would be 'under no repressions outside the laws affecting defamation'. Dark 'could even write on “What I Object to in TRUTH”, or “Where William Temple Was Wrong”'.