You might have thought that Kennedy kitsch was not likely to proceed much further beyond The Best Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, edited by Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg (2005), or that the gold standard had long ago been established with Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye: Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, edited by Kenneth O’Donnell (1972). But you would be wrong.

Here are two volumes of letters of condolence written to Mrs. Kennedy in the wake of her husband’s assassination 47 years ago. Evidently the editors are unaware that presidents receive thousands of missives a day, and have been deluged with correspondence from strangers since the founding of the republic. They seem similarly ignorant of the fact that Americans have always written moving, thoughtful letters to the widows of assassinated presidents—Ida McKinley, Lucretia Garfield, Mary Todd Lincoln—or that Queen Victoria, whose husband had died four years earlier, wrote an especially memorable note to Mrs. Lincoln: “No one can better appreciate than I can, who am myself utterly broken-hearted by the loss of my own beloved Husband, who was the Light of my Life,—my Stay—my All,—What your sufferings must be …”