February 23, 1965 Mr. Henry Regnery President, H. Regnery Company 114 West Illinois Street Chicago, Illinois 60610 Dear Mr. Regnery: It is very good news for me to learn from your letter of February 16 that the Yale Press is prepared to cede to you the reprint rights of Human Action. I do not need to tell you how happy I would be if the book were in the future to be published by your company. You wrote me that the Yale Press in its communication to you re- fers to criticism for the "allegedly poor quality" of the present edition. But in a letter of the Press to my attorney Mr. Rene A. Wormser of September 30, 1963, the Press admitted: "No one at the Press is happy about the printing of this book now on our hands. Its obvious errors are too numerous and the general quality of the work is undeniably below our customary standard." You are perfectly right that the offset plates which the Press plans to lease you could not be used for the production of a decent volume. The dispute between me and the Press concerned precisely this point. I was prepared willy-nilly to acquiesce in the scandalous quality of the present edition if the Press had promised that, once the 2500 copies they had already printed and bound in the summer of 1963 are sold, they will print a new edition of normal quality. But Mr. Kerr wanted me to agree that also for these later printings the faulty plates should be used, the inherent main deficiencies of which should be elimi- nated only "as far as possible." The worst defect of the present edition, a defect that cannot be removed if the present plates are used again, is the strikingly per- ceptible difference in the heaviness of the impression between the passages that have been retained unchaged from the first edition and those that have been altered or added. With the former the print is darker, with the latter it is lighter. This must necessarily give the reader the erroneous idea that this difference means something, that the author wanted to make some distinction between the content of the lighter and that of the darker pages, paragraphs or lines. The emer- gence of such a misinterpretation cannot be avoided by the note on the errata sheet to the effect that this difference in coloring "has no significance whatsoever for the comprehension of the meaning of the text" and is "entirely due to the method applied in the printing." The