TEXT:

Henry Hardy, Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6DP.

Dear Mr Hardy,

Thank you for your letters of 18th February and March and for the kind remarks you pass upon Making Names. No, of course I am not horrified that you have reservations about it, I am most gratified that you are considering it seriously.

Without burdening you with the history of the work, suffice it to say that your adviser is literally the first person in the world (publishing or otherwise) who has actually read this dialogue version of the text, the fruit of over five years of painstaking rewriting. For me it is therefore very exciting that at last someone seems to have recognised the value of some of the ideas I have been battling to express, if a little surprising that they should have been labelled 'Collingwoodian'. Now there's a piece of name-making if you like!

That at present the dialogue frequently clanks, I am only too well aware. The slabs of science I also realised might cause problems, and although I can think at once of certain bits that could be axed or heavily pruned, some brief form of the three key scientific accounts must, I think, remain, as they are central amongst the targets of the philosopher's attack. With respect to the anticipated objection to the book's length, besides the scientific passages, I can identify immediately a number of stretches in the book that could perhaps be cut or pruned without damaging too crucially the whole enterprise. Off the top of my head, there is a fair amount of repetition in Chapters 1 & 2, though in some cases I think it is useful and justifiable repetition. Chapter 3 could quite easily be slimmed down. Chapter 4 could perhaps be slimmed down a little. Chapter 5 could perhaps be cut by one third or more. Chapters 6 & 7 leave little room for manoeuvre, I feel. With regard to Chapter 8 and the play The Children of Electra, the remark that I found most worrying in your letter was the suggestion that this "goes on too long". Although more work is undoubtedly required on the play, there is a sense in which, as far as I am concerned, Electra is what the whole book is about. I would axe Chapters 1 - 7 before I axed Chapter 8. Chapters 1 - 7 are in a way just the footnotes to the play-text. I could, I suppose, provide you with a more detailed 'pruning plan' if this would improve my chances of OUP publication, though this in itself would probably take me a few weeks to draw up. Whether, in the end, the cuts or changes I could agree would count as 'substantial' in your book, I am not sure. How substantial is 'substantially'? That is the key question.

I must say that, Making Names apart (and I think you are probably right, it is at present too long) and with all respect for your publishing experience, I do find this oft-canonised corelation between books' length, price and marketability rather depressing. Not just because it appears to succumb to a modern, simple, mass-marketing logic, but more generally (and this bears upon philosophical arguments in the book) because it assumes far too much predictability on the part of the public and their reading-behaviour. If a 750+ page (over twice the length of Making Names?) pretentious, preposterous, empty monstrosity like Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach can become a mass-market best-seller, then surely anything can happen.

In conclusion then, I am adamant about nothing at the moment and I very much hope that we can agree some formula that will result in the book's publication. However, in the light of experience, one firm resolution that I have made is not to embark upon any further major polishing/rewriting exercise, which I reckon could well take up to six months of full-time work, without first securing a firm commitment from a publisher; I feel that there is already enough of value in the text to justify such a commitment. Also, I assume that before investing money and time in any word-processing exercise, one nowadays should establish what computer system one's publisher will find most compatible.

I hope that these reactions of mine still leave you not uninterested in Making Names and if so, suggest that our next move should be to arrange some sort of meeting. I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely, Andrew Malcolm

Go to the next item or the previous item in the Evidence (red) file.

Go to Malcolm's Statement of Claim, to the Case History, to the Affidavits: Ivon Asquith (1), Asquith (2), Henry Hardy, William Shaw (solicitor) (1), Sir Roger Elliott (1), Margaret Goodall, to the Witness Statements: Elliott, Hardy, Richard Charkin, Nicola Bion, Goodall, to the courtroom testimony of the Oxford Six, 14/3/1990: Elliott, Goodall, Bion, Asquith, Charkin, Hardy, to the testimony of Andrew Malcolm 13/3/1990, to the Chancery Court Judgment, the Appeal Court Judgment, the Damages assessment, the Settlement agreement.

Return to the Malcolm vs. Oxford I (1984-92) Index or to the Malcolm vs. Oxford II (2001-02) Index or to the SITE INDEX.