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660 MARKET STREET, SAN FRANCISCO 4, CALIFORNIA - TELEPHONE: YUKON G6-5115

February 20, 1957

W. H. FREEMAN AND COMPANY PUBLISHERS

Dr. Joshua Lederberg
Department of Genetics

The University of Wisconsin
Madison 6, Wisconsin

Dear Joshua:

If you bring us that manuscript en route to Melbourne
in June, we should be able to start work on it immediately.
Try to allow as much as half a day while you are here to go
over the manuscript with Stanley Schaefer (indeed, if you
could send a copy by mail before-hand, probably Stanley could
study it and talk with you more effectively while you are
here).

In general, I would be pleased to have you add to
that basic portion of the manuscript that you estimate would
make only about 125 pages of printed matter, for reasons you
understand. My recommendation, on the basis of what you
wrote on February 8, is that you make those additions which
you think are truly pertinent and that would make this
volume more usable to the people in the field (do not, of
course, add marginal items just for the sake of building up
the bulk of the book). If any of the papers is important
and at the same time not readily available in most places,
do include it--and do not exclude anything simply because it
is written by one J.L! Most certainly I should think that a
few pages on laboratory exercises would be a valuable adjunct,
In short, we would prefer a book of 250 valuable pages to
one of 125. (By the way, we would probably not print a
mixture of typeset and photo-offset.)

Bring us the manuscript as nearly ready for publica-
tion as you can have it, and Stanley Schaefer expects no
difficulty in having it out within five months,

Have you resolved your trilemma yet? If the problem
gets you down, just bear in mind that few people ever have
their choice of three such places.

AS ever,

/ die

P.S. We'll have contracts drawn up at any time you want
them. I have not done this as yet, thinking that you have my
word that we want to publish this and that we could settle
the matter when you go through here en route to Australia,
probably taking much less time then than if we handled this
matter now by mail.

WHF :mc