Dear Professor Einstein,

At the studio we have been passing around your compact marvel $E = mc^2$, or more precisely

$$R_{\mu\nu} - \frac{1}{2} R g_{\mu\nu} + \Lambda g_{\mu\nu} = \frac{8\pi G}{c^4} T_{\mu\nu}.$$

If energy can hide inside matter, I see no reason a whole world cannot hide inside a few pencil lines. That idea feels very close to animation.

For the mathematically curious I pinned the full field equation on the board once more, just to prove this little letter template can carry both inline and display mathematics without losing its hat.

To make the page turn visible during presentations, what follows is a stretch of deliberate blind text: paper moons, velvet curtains, whistling boilers, and a corridor of ink bottles all waiting politely for their cue. None of it is essential, which is precisely why it earns its place in a demo.

A sensible duck crosses the scene with a ladder, a trumpet, and no explanation. Behind him, the background painters continue calmly with mountains, clouds, and a horizon line so patient that even time itself appears to sit down for a moment and listen. The pencil department insists that every extra sentence should wobble a little, as if it had just stepped out of a test reel. I do not object. A letter that demonstrates layout ought to perform some layout, and a second page is a respectable stage entrance.

There is also a purely practical reason for this harmless verbosity. When the copy grows long enough to travel, one can see whether the margins hold, whether the page numbers behave, and whether the closing stays attached to the signature instead of wandering off like a distracted extra.

If you will permit one more indulgent digression, the art department has been experimenting with a new kind of rain. Not the kind that falls, but the kind that drifts sideways, as though the weather itself had forgotten which way was down. It turns out that if you draw enough of it, the audience begins to feel damp by association, which is a useful effect on a Tuesday afternoon in July.

The projectionist, always a reliable critic, complained that our latest reel contains too many scenes of quiet thinking. He prefers pratfalls, and will accept a tidy explosion if no pratfall is available. I told him that thinking is simply a pratfall of the mind, which satisfied nobody, least of all the projectionist, who walked off muttering about carbon arcs.

Meanwhile the score is coming along. The clarinetist has invented a motif that loops every seven bars instead of the customary eight, which gives the whole sequence a faint feeling of being about to trip over its own shoelace. I find this charming; the composer finds it unbearable; Mickey, diplomatic as ever, finds it a good tempo for walking.

A delegation of accountants arrived this morning with concerned faces and a pocket full of sharpened pencils. They wished to know why a letter template should require three entire pages of text for a mere demonstration. I explained that a layout which fails only on page one is not really a layout; it is an optimist. They nodded slowly, wrote something small in a ledger, and declined the offered coffee.

The pencil department, not to be outdone, has proposed a small revision to the margins. Their argument, delivered on a napkin, involves the golden ratio, the lunar calendar, and a diagram of a duck that I cannot quite interpret. I have thanked them for their zeal and returned the napkin with a polite note suggesting that the current margins are, in fact, already load-bearing.

There is a rumor in the ink room that a third fold mark may soon be added to the standard, halfway between Falz 1 and Falz 2, so that future correspondence may be folded into thirds of thirds. Nobody has confirmed this. Nobody has denied it. The rumor exists in that pleasant administrative fog where a thing is neither true nor false but merely pending approval.

If this paragraph still fits comfortably within the body of the letter, the layout is behaving itself and deserves a small round of applause. If, however, it has wandered into the footer, the signature, or the address window, then the layout is misbehaving and should be spoken to firmly but kindly, in the manner of a cat that has knocked over a vase and is pretending not to have noticed.

• The playful demo brand is now the short acronym ACME.
• Inline math such as $E = mc^2$ render correctly.
• I wrote this letter with a new invention called Electronic Numerical Integrator; what a blast. It even supports Cascading Style Sheets, but it is rather slow.

One last ribbon of filler should pass through the projector before the curtain falls: extra paper, extra ink, and one more courteous paragraph to make the lower half of the page earn its keep.

If Mickey asks whether science can sing, I shall tell him that your equations already do.

With admiration,

Walt Disney