March 3, 1947
Dr. Leslie Sutton
Magdalen College
Oxford University
Oxford, England
Dear Sutton:
I was pleased to receive your letter of February 14—I had just been getting ready to write to you when it arrived, because my plans seamed to be pretty definite now.
It will be fine for you to come to the electron diffraction conference this summer. I doubt that I shall be there, but I am not absolutely sure about my plans.
I am coming to England for the months of June and July, having just decided to make this trip. I think that my wife will come along too. If things go well, we shall arrive about June 8, visit around the country a bit, beginning with a short stay in Cambridge, attend the Centenary Celebration of the Chemical Society in London July 15-17, and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry during the next week. I suppose that our return trip will begin at the end of July. At present we have about a month, from the middle of June to the middle of July, with our plans rather indefinite. We shall, of course, come to Oxford for a few days during this period, for a look around in preparation for our arrival at the end of the year.
I am afraid that our visit will cross yours, but I hope that we still are able to see you before you leave for America.
My activities in the crystal structure and electron diffraction fields have not got built up again, after the interruption of the war. I have a paper on the structure of metals and intermetallic compounds, and especially the interpretation of interatomic distances, in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Also I am interested in some crystals which Mrs. Rogers-Low is working on now.
Mrs. Lonsdale has just arrived, for a stay of a month here. She is a very nice person.
The last few months have seen me hard at work on my textbook of freshman chemistry. It is to be published soon, the first copies presumably to be available the middle of May. The galley proof has not yet started to come in, but I would not be surprised to receive the first galleys today. The book is about 500 pages long—it contains 16 or 17 chapters which are mainly
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theoretical, and the same number of chapters on descriptive chemistry.
Please let me know what your sailing dates are, as soon as you learn them. I can't tell you my plans exactly now, because I too have not got steamship reservations.
Cordially yours,
Linus Pauling:par