Box 522
Mount Pleasant, SC 29465
18 July, 1989

Unto the members of the College of Arms and any others who may read this missive, greetings from Alisoun MacCoul of Elphane, Laurel Queen of Arms!

Thanks to the kindness and technical expertise of Jasper Greensmith of Caid, the enclosed letter was distributed to the members of the College of Arms who were present at the Symposium in Caid. I am sorry for the delay in the formal issuance of the letter, but I have been in almost constant transit since it was completed (from New York to Los Angeles to New York to South Carolina via several intervening states with a brief encounter with a Deadhead Migration in Washington, D.C.!). It is only today that the necessary items for formal distribution have all been in the same state at the same time!

In case you are curious, as many no doubt are, as to how (and why) the letter was produced in Caid, let me explain and pay proper tribute to Jasper's expertise. Thanks to the need to review all the late-arriving commentary for the June meeting, the letter was finished in the midst (literally) of packing in New York as bits of my computer system went into boxes for the trip South. The plan was to go to my firm's New York office, print out the text and then hope that scheduling in Caid allowed for copying and distribution since time was tight. As it happened, thanks to several mundane crises, I had to make a decision between going to the office and making the flight to California. At the time, it seemed prudent to make the flight...

I therefore arrived in California clutching (almost literally) a 5 1/4 inch low density IBM PC disk with the files for the letter complete in Microsoft Word. Enquiring of Crescent as I signed in about the possibilities of getting a print out, the Registrar of the Symposium (Jasper) indicated that he had a Mac but had the ability to transfer disks and used Microsoft Word for the Mac. As Microsoft swears the two are totally file (and style sheet) compatible, we decided it was worth a shot for him to take the disk to work and transfer it and then try to print it out on the Postscript laser printer which supposedly was functionally equivalent to mine.

Well, it is not nearly as easy as that, but to my joy the next evening Jasper presented me with two dozen copies of an actual identifiable letter of acceptances and returns. The justification was a bit odd in places as was the pagination, but on the whole it was very nice!

In case you are one of those who received a copy from that batch, you are receiving another copy because I have rejustified and repaged after my return to South Carolina before printing and I wish to assure that everyone has a copy of the "final" version for their files so that future references to pagination will not be erroneous. (This is particularly important for those of you who are doing precedential or armorial work from these.) However, these are the only changes that have been made: no decisions or wordings have been changed, no punctuation has been corrected, etc. What you see is what you got.

Your servant,

[Alisoun]