To Eduard Koch?1   6 February 1876

Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.

Feb 6. 76

Dear Sir

Mr Murray has forwarded your letter of the third to me, and I have asked him to send you the cliches the cost of which is £3, and this sum you can transmit to him.2 I cannot yet say when a new edit of my book on Orchids will be prepared, as I intend to publish another book first.3 It will therefore be at least a year

Dear Sir | Yrs faithfully | Ch. Darwin

LS

1
The correspondent is conjectured from the references to the price of clichés and the new edition of Orchids (see nn. 2 and 3, below). Koch was the head of E. Schweizerbart’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung.
2
John Murray generally sold electrotypes of the illustrations to CD’s books to foreign publishers at a small profit over cost. The sum of £3 was charged for the electrotypes of Climbing plants 2d ed. (see Correspondence vol. 23, letter from R. F. Cooke, 16 November 1875). Climbing plants 2d ed. was published in German in October 1876 (Carus trans. 1876c; see letter to J. V. Carus, 25 October 1876). It formed the first part of volume 9 of the collected German edition of CD’s works.
3
CD worked on Cross and self fertilisation until May 1876, when he began correcting the second edition of Orchids; he continued to work on both books at intervals (CD’s ‘Journal’ (Appendix II)). Cross and self fertilisation was published on 10 November 1876 (Freeman 1977) and Orchids 2d ed. was published in January 1877 (Publishers’ Circular, 1 February 1877, p. 93). The German translation of Orchids 2d ed., which was the second part of volume 9 of the collected German edition of CD’s works, was published in 1877 (Carus trans. 1877c).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-10383,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-10383