Letter 96
BR TO GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. / STANLEY UNWIN, 4 SEPT. 1918
BRACERS 47456. ALS. Reading
Previous Brixton letter, BRACERS 19358; next letter, BRACERS 121445
Edited by K. Blackwell, A. Bone, N. Griffin and S. Turcon

<letterhead>
57 GORDON SQUARE,
LONDON, W.C.
<Brixton Prison>1
Sp. 4. 1918

Dear Mr Unwin,

Re Scandinavian rights,2 writing hastily to Miss Rinder on Monday3 I did not observe that it was Political Ideals4 you were alluding to.5 I believe the rights of this, except in America, are mine, but I think^a I never saw the contract, which was made on my behalf by Albert J. Nock,6 Hotel Lafayette, University Place, N. Y. City. Simplest way of finding out is to ask Century Co. as Nock is busy and a bad correspondent. I am fairly sure they have no rights in Europe.

Yours sincerely
Bertrand Russell.

• 1

  [document] The letter was edited from a photocopy of the signed original in BR’s hand in the Allen & Unwin archives at the University of Reading. The initials of approval, “CH”, of the Brixton Governor are at the top of the sheet.

• 2

  Scandinavian rights See Frank’s letter to Unwin the next day (Letter 98).

• 3

  Miss Rinder on Monday The letter alluded to by BR seems not to be extant. The previous extant letter to Rinder is that of 26 August 1918, Letter 84. In it there was a message for Unwin, but the message isn’t in the typescript made from the missing original.

• 4

  Political Ideals The book publication of BR’s 1916 lecture series, “The World as It Can Be Made” (see Papers 14: 224 and Pt. VI). No translations prior to 1963 into any Scandinavian languages are known.

• 5

  you were alluding to Unwin’s letter about Scandinavian rights is not extant in the Russell Archives.

• 6

  contract … made on my behalf by Albert J. Nock Acting as an ad hoc literary agent, Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945), pacifist, writer, educator and publisher, negotiated terms for the Century Company’s publication of Political Ideals in 1917 in the US. He had met BR at a Quaker Conference in London in June 1915. After the war Nock founded The Freeman, a New York political weekly which published a number of BR’s writings in the 1920s — with B.W. Huebsch (see Letter 74) as the paper’s publisher.

• a

  I think Inserted.