July 16, 1946

Mr. William H. Freeman, Jr.

1020 Union Street

San Francisco, California

Dear Bill:

I am very pleased to receive your letter of July 11, from your home. It is fine that Olsen and his colleagues have agreed about the quantitative book. I am sure that it will be first-rate.

I am favorable to Glenn Seaborg's "Nuclear Chemistry". I have not talked at all with Seaborg about the book, and I have not seen enough of Seaborg to be sure about details of his writing; but I judge, from reading his papers, that he would do a good job, and, of course, he knows the field extremely well. Moreover, I would be of the opinion that the book would sell moderately well, because of the pretest interest in the subject, which will probably continue rather than diminish. I think that it will not be many years before some universities will present courses in nuclear chemistry for senior students as well as graduate students — we have, in fact, scheduled such a course, with an undergraduate number, for the coming year, the course to be presented by Dodson. If Seaborg's book were to be elementary enough, in the first part at any rate, to be used as a text for such a course, then it would be entirely appropriate to include it in the series of chemistry texts. I hope that Seaborg does not plan to write purely an advanced treatise.

My answer accordingly is that I would like to see the book in the chemistry text series, and I hope that you will try to get Seaborg to sign up with you. As for my talking with Seaborg, I would be glad to do so, and it might be worth while for me to telephone him, if there are any questions in his mind.

As to the Lucas-Pressman laboratory manual, I doubt that it can be split in two, and published in two volumes. The experiments assigned to the students in our junior course in first year organic chemistry are selected from all of the chapters of the present manuscript. Moreover, nearly all of the experiments are worked by the students during each year. The method which Professor Lucas follows is to assign the various experiments in each chapter to different students, so that they are all worked, and he asks each student to keep en eye on the other students as they carry out the experiments which he himself does not do.

I think that there is a real chance that this laboratory manual would become popular, and would sell well, even at a considerably higher price than the usual manual. Possibly a small amount of pruning could be done to the manual, but I rather favor its publication in essentially its present extended form.

Sincerely yours,

Linus Pauling

LP:gw