Ɛpsilon

WCP3381

Letter (WCP3381.3349)

[1]

Parkstone, Dorset.

March 11th. 1897

Messrs Macmillan & Co.1

Dear Sirs

I should not write to you again on the subject of my last letter2 were it not that you have made a serious mistake in regard to our Agreements. No such phrase as — "during the legal terms of copyright"— occurs in any of our existing Agreements. It did occur in the first agreement for "Tropical Nature"3 which was not a "Royalty" but a "share of profits" agreement.

[2] The early agreements for the Malay Archipelago,4 Island Life,5 Geog. Dist. of Animals,6 and the later agreements for Darwinism,7 and for the three cheap Editions of my other works, all state that you agree to pay certain Royalties on— "every copy they sell of the said works"— without limitations of time whatever. And this is quite fair and [3] reasonable, since you will of course not print anymore - than you can sell at a profit, and none of my books are at all likely to be reprinted by other publishers.

Had your agreements contained the words you mention I should of course not have written to you on the subject.

Believe Me | yours very truly | Alfred R Wallace [signature]

1
Macmillan, Frederick Orridge (1851-1936). Eldest son of Daniel Macmillan, a founding partner in the bookselling and publishing firm of Macmillan & Co.
3
Wallace, A. R. 1895. Natural selection and tropical nature: Essays on descriptive and theoretical biology. London: Macmillan.
4
Wallace, A. R. 1890. The Malay Archipelago: The land of the orang-utan, and the bird of paradise. A narrative of travel, with studies of man and nature. London and New York: Macmillan and Co.
5
Wallace, A. R. 1895. Island life: or, the phenomena and causes of insular faunas and floras, including a revision and attempted solution of the problem of geological climates. Second and revised edition. London and New York: Macmillan and Co.
6
Wallace, A. R. 1876. The geographical distribution of animals; with a study of the relations of living and extinct faunas as elucidating the past changes of the Earth's surface. London: Macmillan & Co. Two volumes.
7
Wallace, A. R. 1889. Darwinism: an exposition of the theory of natural selection with some of its applications. London & New York: Macmillan & Co.

Editorial information

Status: Draft transcription [Letter (WCP3381.3349)]

For more information about the transcriptions and metadata, see https://wallaceletters.myspecies.info/content/epsilon

Revision history

Transcribed by Shariff, Bashira [2013-07-01] Transcription checked by Chua, Christine [2026-04-18]

Please cite as “WCP3381,” in Beccaloni, G. W. (ed.), Ɛpsilon: The Alfred Russel Wallace Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/wallace/letters/WCP3381