Looks like this letter is 1973, the book 1981. His ultimate point is that he wasn't exploiting the letter for attention. 8 years after the incident, I think it's safe to claim the potential for exploitation is gone.
EDIT: Oh, you mean you took him literally, that he didn't even have his own copy. Well:
"And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands."
It sounds like this could imply that he could be holding onto a copy himself. Interesting point, why would you do that if you didn't mean to exploit it, at least eventually? Or maybe he just likes to hold on to things for records.
I know personally I keep copies of every letter I send, simply to refer back to if and when the recipient responds to me; it's useful to know what questions I asked when the answers come in.
That's a lot easier now than it was back then. Maybe he used carbon paper but there was no photocopying and obviously no word processing, at least nothing that an individual outside of a specialist organisation would have access to.
It's obviously the most likely explanation but still, it perhaps stretches what might be considered usual for the period.
Presumably Vonnegut kept the draft, or kept the original and sent McCarthy the one copy. The letter's text was later included in Vonnegut's book, Palm Sunday, as mentioned on the site.
Although I can understand your not enjoying this particular letter or agreeing with its inclusion on a blog named Letters of Note, to hear you then use that as a stick with which to beat my entire website - a website you admittedly know nothing about - does smart a little. I'd suggest maybe having a poke around; you may come to the conclusion that today's letter simply wasn't to your liking and that, actually, the website does have some value.
To be able to make an accurate assessment of your website, and proclaim my expertise on it as such, I should look around more than base my conclusion on one post, that much is true. That said when one makes decisions, it's usually based on incomplete information; and the lower the stakes, the faster the decision. When reading this letter I only had the one in front of me to decide if I was going to read any of the others, to see if those were better, and considering the very low value of the one I saw I didn't see it as good use of my time (or more accurate, the most suitable thing to waste my time on...) to browse other letters.
I guess the snide remark didn't contribute anything to the point of my original post, and that that post would've been off just as well without it. Well such is the nature of a forum - I would like it too if I had hours and hours to hoohah over each sentence I write and get to compile them into nice internally consistent and rhetorically perfect masterpieces. Alas I'm just a programmer posting in between compilation and simulation runs, so the style is much more conversational, and conclusions are often more haphazard than any that would stand up to rigorous scientific standards.
