Humph. I've never gotten an autographed book, though I have gotten nice notes and letters. I once wrote Andrew Greeley about a serious error in time in one of his books, and got a very nice note saying, in effect, why bother having editors?
Another time I pointed out to the younger Shaara that the US VP who became a Confederate general was Breckinridge, not Breckenridge. Interesting story, there. I was wandering through the Confederate White House some years back and saw Breckinridge. Since I lived not too far from Breckenridge, CO, knew that the town was named after the general, and assumed they had spelled it properly, I made a fool out of myself by telling a docent they had misspelled the guy's name.
Actually, the town had been Breckinridge, but in anger at his perfidy they changed the spelling to Breckenridge after their namesake went South (literally).
The other error I noted in the book was that he had the Shenandoah river flowing south, rather than north.
In his letter to me, Shaara thanked me for finding the errors, promised they'd be fixed in future editions, and related to me that in one other major error in the book he had moved Newport News across Chesapeake Bay and that he had referred to John Brown's having been hung. (I had noted the latter error and decided not to mention it when I wrote to him.)
But a friend of mine struck real paydirt many years back. He wrote to John Dos Passos to point out some error in USA, and got back a full page holographic letter defending the error (signed of course.) Charlie has this framed and hanging in his law office.
