Since the receipt of your last letter, from which I understood that you would be willing if it appeared quite necessary to the proper publication of my book to advance payments on its cost, I have not written because I have been expecting to go to Hartford to talk about it.

I thought Edwards would go to Boston & see if he could [get) a Boston house to take hold with us in the publication. He has no other business there however until the close of the month & deems it advisable, as I believe it is, that before making such a proposition, he should be furnished with a fair, clean proof of the greater part of the book—if not the whole of it.

In a week or ten days the stereotyping, I should now judge, would be completed: then will be some delay to complete the electrotyping of the last cuts. But of the first 150 pages we are ready to order the press-work immediately. [376] Edwards is anxious I should make definite arrangements before we begin that. I have asked him to put on paper his proposition for me to offer you & I will send it as soon as he does so. If it would really give you much trouble or inconvenience to accept this, I don’t want you to do it. I don’t doubt that I could easily make such an arrangement as I proposed to you, with someone here—Barney or Judge Emerson & Dudley Field—for there can be little doubt that the book will pay eventually 20 per cent. on cost of publication, I should think. The only objection I have to doing so is the exposition to them that would be necessary of our want of capital—& of my private want of capital.

But considering that as a matter of business entirely—I want for my private purposes outside of the business, a small sum of money, outside of the partnership business, I mean, and a little outside of all business.

There is a certain kind of private advertizing of myself to be done in connection with the issue of my book which I don’t want to feel so cramped in doing as I do. There is a sort of’ literary republic, which it is not merely pleasant & gratifying to my ambition to be recognized in, but also profitable. It would for example, if I am so recognized & considered, be easy for me, in case of the non-success of this partnership, to get employment in the newspaper offices or other literary enterprises at good wages—to make arrangements for correspondence if I wished to travel, & so on.

To take & keep a position as a recognized litterateur, as a man of influence in literary matters, I need at the time of the publication of my book to be able to spend a little more than I like at this juncture to draw out of our partnership bank. And I hate, as Edwards expects of me, to be running in debt to tailors & cobblers & cooks.