PATRICIA RUSSELL TO W.W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC. / WARDER NORTON, 19 FEB. 1938
BRACERS 47215. TLS. Norton papers, Columbia U.
Proofread by K. Blackwell and A. Duncan

<letterhead>
Amberley House
Kidlington
Oxfordshire.1
February 19 1938

Dear Mr. Norton,

Bertie has asked me to reply to your letter, because he is absorbed in his philosophical lectures to the exclusion of everything else.

He likes the look of the Principles and is glad you are so hopeful about it. He thanks you for The Folklore of Capitalism, which arrived this morning, and which he will read as soon as he can.

The typescript of the Science of Power in its present form is with Mr. Unwin, to whom I am writing to ask that it should be sent as soon as possible to you. He will send also the “blurb”. The table of contents and memo. about the remainder of the book are not possible, for the book as it is is a skeleton rather than a torso; i.e., it is not complete as far as it goes but unfinished. It is a number of lectures to be enlarged here and there, and he can’t say just how and where until he tackles it, which he can’t do till the philosophical lectures (Language and Fact2) are out of the way. He tells me to tell you that it will expand like a concertina, but I don’t much like this simile, because I have said that it is like a skeleton, and a skeleton expanding like a concertina is too horrible to think of. He says you can provisionally use the table of contents with the lectures, as what he principally intends is to lengthen each chapter. But you mustn’t then be cross with him if he alters the names of some chapters and the position of others.

Lucky people going to Bermuda. I wish we could go there, or anywhere out of England. Respects to you both,

Yours sincerely,
P. Russell

• 1

  [document] Proofread against a microfilm printout of the original.

• 2

  Language and Fact Published as An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940).