Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library
Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library© 2002 By the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia. All rights reserved.
Funding: Web version of the finding aid funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Processed by: Special Collections Department
There are no restrictions.
See the University of Virginia Library’s use policy.
Bill Nye Letter, Accession #7949-e, Special Collections Dept., University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.
This collection was purchased on 1992 December 9.
This letter, 1886, from Bill Nye, Hudson, Wisconsin, to "My Dear Boy" was written while the American humorist Bill Nye and poet John Whitcomb Riley were enormously successful as a "double bill" on the lecturing circuit, joined by poet Eugene Field for at least part of the year in 1886, Nye requests specific hotel accomodations for them and hints that Riley occasionally overindulges in his drinking, "We will take in any little champagne lunch you may have lying around loose, though I want to put a flea in your ear as to Mr. Riley. His favorite stumbling block is the flowing bowl and I hope that he will not be pressed to overdo it."