INTERNATIONAL PSYCHO‑ANALYTICAL ASSOCIATION

«IP0,0»                                 11 April 1924  London W1

Dear Professor,

«IP4,0»I have for some time been meaning to send you a report of our activities in regard to the Press but the situation kept changing from day to day so that no suitable moment presented itself.  I have been fighting very hard to induce some leading publisher to establish a "Monograph Series" which could function as a continuation of our previous one and have interviewed many of the leading ones.  They have practically all turned down the proposal, giving as their main reason the discouraging reports from America about Psycho‑Analysis being a dead subject there (!); Heinemann, on whom I had set great hopes finally decided in the negative yesterday.  The only firm with whom I am still in negotiation is the Cambridge University Press, but I have very little hope there.

We have also been working with various American firms to arrange for purely American sales, and here we have had better luck.  Boni & Liveright have practically agreed to buy two thousand sheets of the "«MDUL»Group Psychology«MDNM»" and "«MDUL»Pleasure Principle«MDNM»" and to issue them there.  The rest of our stock is derilect, though we shall still persevere with some efforts to sell it for a small sum.  As regards translations, the first volume of the "«MDUL»Collected Papers«MDNM»" has, as you know, long been printed in Berlin, though we have not yet received any actual copy of the book.  Our agent seems to have misappropriated for other purposes money we gave him to pay the German printer and so we are having delay and difficulty in inducing the latter to send off the books.  The same happened with the last October number of the "«MDUL»Journal«MDNM»", but I hear that this has just reached London.  Of Vol:II. more than half is translated and revised.  Of Vol: III, the "«MDUL»Krankengeschichten«MDNM»", three‑quarters is translated and revised.  It would have been finished long since, but Strachey has not sent me anymore material since Christmas, though he had promised to complete it by that date.  He is extraordinarily slow and inhibited.  Translation work has also been begun on Vol: IV, so you will see that more than half of the whole undertaking is finished from the translation side.

Rank will now, I understand, arrange for the publication of these "«MDUL»Collected Papers«MDNM»" in America.  I naturally trust that the sacrifices we have made will not be thrown away and that it will be possible for him to arrange that the American publisher acquires our translations and the material of the book we have already published.  There could be no technical difficulty in this.

In the last few years I have personally revised every word of the translation of five of your books and have been only too glad of the opportunity.  As you know it has long been my ambition to put out some of your work in a worthy form in English and I have even cherished the hope that in the future it might be possible to come to some arrangement whereby new translations could be published of the other books as well («MDUL»Traumdeutung«MDNM», etc.).  Of the latter hope this is not the moment to speak, though I shall look eagerly for any opportunity of realising it.

If I do not get a telegram from you by midday on Tuesday, I shall change our tickets so as to be able to proceed via Vienna and Semmering.  I am hopeful that you will not send a telegram to stop me.  In case you should need it, my address in Salzburg will be "Grand Hôtel de l'Europe".

With warmest wishes,  Yours always cordially,  Ernest Jones