Problem is here, "fair use" is a bag of snakes--does fair use include publishing a one-line letter? After a few hours of digging into legalese and opinion about fair use, it came to me that this is all a gray area. If I have doubts, I ask, if there's someone around to ask. As I understand it, newspaper articles have all been published, so that any such copyright for 19th century newspapers that once existed is now expired, yet if you look at online scans of papers like the NY Times, they all want to disclaim use. Tom Tenney believes that "fair use" quoting from a book is about 300 words or less, which I have adopted as a practice. MTP doesn't want you to publish an entire letter, but when I asked about one-liners and the like (the vast majority of Sam's letters seem to be a paragraph or two or less) they couldn't give me a definitive answer. "Build it and they will come" becoming "Publish it and they will holler (or sue)" becomes the operative. Does the fair use serve a larger good? Does it in any way damage anyone? Google up fair use and it becomes the Tar Baby. DHF