November 2), 1954

Mr, William H. Freeman
W. H. Freeman and Company
Publishers

549 Market Street

San Francisco 5, Calif.

Dear Bill:

Dr, Cavalli and I were happy to receive your letter of the 19th.
It may save some unnecessary duplication of correspondence in the future
4f we mention that you can conduct all of your financial and editorial
dealings directly with me. Dr, Cavalli has given me formal legal authori-
gation for this, Of course I will be in contimous touch with him per-
sonally.

You will forgive me if I hope that many more of your deserving
authors give you the kind of trouble that you mentioned in your first
paragraph.

We could not be more pleased at your favorable response to our pro=
posal on the book. Before we make any formal commitment, however, I am
keeping under advisement suggestions that have been made by other pub-
lishers, in order to be sure that when or if we finally do close with you,
there will be no later regrets. You may be interested but not surprised
that of several publishers whom we have contacted, Macmillan and Saunders
expressed no interest in the proposal, the latter perhaps because of their
inferring some conflict with Werner Braun's book. One or two others are
still considering the matter, apparently from a more favorable standpoint,
I think you would be most interested to know that C. C, Thomas in partie~
ular respomied with an imncdiate affirmative reply, which we are taking
under consideration. This may be of interest to you in reflecting their
judgaent as to the marketability of the proposed book to the medical audie
ence for which they specialize,

If we sign with you, we will of course be entirely in your hands with
regard to the production and promotion of the book. If by "little" volume
you have in mind something comparable to the Methuen series, we could not
be more delighted, I will be interested to learn what you have up your
sleeve with regard to the experimental handling of distribution,

Your advice to polish the work as mich as possible is going to be
taken very mch to heart, since this is precisely our own objective, I am
sure that you will have heard from your advisers that my own scientific
writing style has sometimes left a good deal to be desired from the point
of view of clarity and simplicity. My technical papers have been addressed
to what I have hoped to have been technically trained minds. The present
enterprise has an entirely different objective and we will do the best that
Page 2 =~ Letter to W. H, Freeman November a, 195)

we can, We will also keep in mimi your comments on the length of the text,
although it is a little difficult to predict at this stage just how that
will-come out. I understand the advisability of dealing with multiples of
32 pages.

We certainly would have very little to offer by way of one-page
capsules for the general practitioner. The medical men whom we have in
mind are the internists and other specialists who are interested in the
bases of chemotherapy, who have written unfortunstely too many uninformed
papers on the question of drug resistance from both clinical and experi-
mental standpoints, and who have been attracted in the past to such works
of other aspects of chemotherapy as Work and Work's "The basis of chemo-
therapy", or Albert's "Selective toxicity". The level of interest and
comprehension that we hope to aim at is that of the second or third year
medical student, who will have had some bacteriology and is learning the
applications of this and of chemotherapy in his practical training as well.
However, as you must already have convinced yourself, such a presentation
4s likely to have a much broader scientific interest. I would guess that
the audience would be mich the same as that for Albert's book just mentimed
above.

Dr. Cavalli and I are aiming to complete the mamacript by the end of
next year. You may know better than I whether this is an over-optimistic
intention,

We will be pleased to receive the contractsmentioned in your letter.

However we may desire to hold them under advisement for a period of a few
weeks before taking final action.

Yours sincerely,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

JL img