TLS, one page, 8.25 x 11.75, November 28, 1968. Written from the Montreux Palace Hotel, a letter to Heather Mansell of Penguin Books, Ltd., responding to her telegram, in part: "You are mistaken. The butterfly you figure on your cover for Speak, Memory is the one called daphnis by Schiffermuller and meleager by Esper belongs to the subgenus called Meleageria by Sagarra, whilst the butterfly I figure on the plate facing p.288 of the Weidenfeld edition of the book is the one called cormion by me, and belongs structurally to the subgenus called Lysandra by Hemming. My butterfly differs in male organ, wing shape, upperside coloration and underside pattern from your butterfly. Yours is a butterfly widely distributed throughout the southern part of central Europe and Russia; mine is an extremely rare freak, possibly a hybrid between Meleageria daphnis (meleager) and Lysandra coridon. The upper of your two figures is presumably a female of the Meleageria species (the colored photograph gives it an impossible green shade of blue and a revolting red rim); the female of my butterfly remains unknown to me (my two types are both males). And finally your butterfly is precisely one of the two, M. daphnis (meleager), from which I separate my L. cormion as a distinct organism! To recapitulate: You illustrate the wrong butterfly on your cover. This adds a gratuitous pictorial muddle to an obscure and subtle taxonomic problem. I cannot reconsider my objection." In fine condition. Accompanied by the original mailing envelope. For their annual summer vacation, Nabokov and his wife Vera roamed the pastoral and mountain reaches of the western United States looking for butterflies. As a passionate entomologist, in particular the study of lepidopterology, Nabokov studied the delicate creatures all his life, chasing them about while he wrote his classic Lolita, and then, as a research fellow in zoology, organizing the lepidoptera collection of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. The book Fines Lines reproduces a hundred and fifty-four of his magnificent illustrations of butterfly wings and genitalia. Pre-certified PSA/DNA.
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