His immediate future in Leipzig assured, Straube sat down in autumn 1907 to write Henri and Martha Hinrichsen on the occasion of the birth of their son Walter, whose fate would intertwine with his own some four decades later. “You certainly are a good boy,” he began, “because you appeared so nice and punctually. Punctuality is half of life, and if you hold with that, you will be astounded at how much time you can gain for the completion of things. Just ask your father how he values and appreciates the composers who deliver on time.” These lines, signed “little Lisbet, Aunt and Uncle Straube,” bear witness to the warm ties that had developed between the Hinrichsen and Straube households. But Straube had another reason for crafting his congratulations in just this striking way, a little treatise on promptness, coded language that Hinrichsen perhaps was inclined to decipher. For Straube, whose work ethic had always rivaled Reger’s, was reaching the point that tested his self-prized ability to keep several balls in the air at once. Ground zero for this moment lay in the area of publishing, with consequences that would pursue him the rest of his life.

At latest by 1906, at the height of dissatisfaction with his professional circumstances in Leipzig, Straube was at work on a new collection of organ pieces for Peters, this time an album of chorale preludes principally from the pre-Bach period. His earlier editions of Liszt and “old masters” had met a favorable market, helping to spread his name. The new work would appear the following year as Choralvorspiele alter Meister, offering forty-five pieces by German composers from Scheidt to Friedemann Bach, this time without registrations but with the chorale texts printed above the corresponding preludes. Other editorial interventions remained much the same as before, “as I see it.” The original concept was hardly this, however, floated in that long letter to Hinrichsen on May 24, 1906, the date of Reimann's death. “I first thought about Bach's model,” wrote Straube concerning the title, poised to derail into his typical self-criticism, “and in historic-romantic form enthused over: ‘Ein Orgelbüchlein.’