To Gilbert Seldes
9 Avenue de l’Observatoire
Paris. September 20, 1921
I am far from wishing to find fault with your scale of payments—all my books together don’t yield such sums in a year—but it occurs to me that paying authors by the page is an encouragement to prolixity. Why not have a graduated scale like the income-tax, so much for the first page, less for the second, nothing for the tenth, and a minus quantity after that? This system would be particularly good for poets.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Three, 1921-1927. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY