13 items, comprising one TLS from Orwell and a note concerning libel, four TLS, the original publishing contract and six carbons. Including: first response from Victor Gollancz to Orwell, admiring the manuscript and asking to borrow Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which he has never heard of; Orwell's reply, stating that the police have seized his copy, and discussing literature in general; correspondence between Rubinstein, Gollancz, and Orwell concerning the possibility of libelling Evelyn Waugh as having adopted Catholicism as a "profitable pose" and other legal matters; the original contract for the work signed by Orwell; correspondence from 1943 confirming Gollancz's retention of the rights; letters concerning the Penguin edition and Sonia Orwell's rights.

The comprehensive archive of correspondence between Orwell and his publisher relating to his first published essay collection Inside The Whale.
The titular essay in the collection concerns Orwell's appreciation for his friend Henry Miller's work, and the correspondence between Orwell and Gollancz on this matter provides an important insight into the intense censoriousness affecting the literary world in the 1930s and 40s.
In this instance Gollancz asks to borrow Orwell's copy of Tropic Of Cancer, but Orwell responds by telling Gollancz that he cannot lend him the book as his house had been raided for banned books after he was caught sending a letter to the proscribed Obelisk Press, Miller's publisher, and many were confiscated. The prosecutor allowed him to have his copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover back, but not Tropic of Cancer, probably as "Miller's books have not been in print long enough to have become respectable".
A second spectre of literary London in this period is the issue of libel, a constant concern of Gollancz's, which rears its head here in Orwell's assertion that Evelyn Waugh's conversion to Catholicism might be imposture. Following Gollancz's lawyers flagging of this potential suit, Orwell readily agrees to make the necessary changes.
In all, the archive provides a perfect microcosm of the tensions involved in publishing between the wars with pressure coming not just from the state, as Orwell would famously later unravel, but also from fellow travellers in the literary world.

Stock ID: 39398