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Thomas Jefferson Letter, 1823 April 30, Accession #11011, Special Collections Dept., University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.
This letter was purchased by the Library from Robert F. Batchelder, Ambler, Pennsylvania, on May 9, 1991.
In this letter from Thomas Jefferson, Monticello, to "Dear Sir" [John Laval], Philadelphia bookseller, April 30, 1823, Jefferson accepts an offer for the two already published volumes in English of Bartolome de Las Casas (1474-1566), with the subsequent volumes to be sent later by mail and refuses a copy of Alexander Wilson's American Ornithology; or The Natural History of Birds of the United States as too extravagant for his purse.
He also expresses a wish that a cheaper eight volume edition of the text alone, or the text with just light sketches of the birds instead of the colored plates, be published some day since he believes that a cheaper version would be more useful in propagating the science of ornithology than the folio edition.