{Manchester,] Saturday, 27 November 1852 

Dear Marx, 

Assuming I can raise anything towards the cost of printing the 
pamphlet, it will be at most £2-3—at the moment I am myself in 
a fix. But 3 printed sheets will cost between £10 and £12, and 
even more with stitching, etc., etc. Unless the thing is printed on 
the Continent for the account of, or at least in partnership with, a 
bookseller, it will not get round at all. On reaching Prussia, etc., 
etc., it will be confiscated, and we shall be cheated by the 
booksellers. So we shall have to regard the money as sacrificed on 
this business, for there certainly won’t be any return in the way of 
£. s. d. The question now is whether we can spend this amount 
upon it; or at least, whether it might not be better to condense the 
thing into 1-1'/y sheets, so that the cost is rather more 
commensurate with our resources. December and January are for 
me the two most difficult months in the whole year; I can hardly 

a Blank-> The Duke of Wellington -¢ K. Marx, Revelations Concerning the 
Communist Trial in Cologne. 

consider making any further contribution to the cost before 
February. If we have it printed on credit, the printer will, as with 
Weydemeyer, end up by withholding copies until he has been 
paid.** And whatever we do, we must begin by finding out what 
prospects there are of its being distributed; at the moment there 
would seem to be virtually none. 

Weerth is coming up to London tomorrow and sails from 
Southampton on 2 December. His outfit cost him a great deal of 
money. Strohn, too, will shortly be travelling to London and 
thence to the Continent. The travelling expenses he must incur in 
establishing himself (on foreign capital to boot, or so I hear) are so 
heavy that we shall not be able to squeeze anything out of him 
either. So we are all of us in a fix. 

It is my opinion that, unless you have reasonably good channels 
of distribution through booksellers, the thing won’t even be heard 
of, and, like all literature published by émigrés, will go before 
anyone in Germany has a chance to see it. And that is very 
bad—even worse, in some ways, than if nothing were done at all. 
For it would provide public proof that we are dependent on 
hole-and-corner German emigrant printing presses and are 
powerless to get anything done. We were able to disassociate 
ourselves from the fiasco of Bürgers’ circular* by withdrawing into 
our literary sanctum, but even this could be compromised were we 
to admit literary impotence in such a way. The Prussian 
government would be delighted to see us reduced in matters of 
publicity to the same expedients as were available to the 
demagogues of 1831 during their exile,°” i.e. virtually zero. 
Lamentable though this is, it would, I think, be better, if we at 
least did not blazon it abroad. Furthermore, now that the new 
crime of treasonable correspondence [...] has been recognised by 
the jury, we could not send a single copy to the Rhine Province, 
which would be the chief market, without compromising hundreds 
of people. 

I shall send you the money on 1 or 2 December. Consider the 
matter once more and, if you still think it would be better to print 
the pamphlet in this way rather than not at all, you should at least 
try so to arrange things that we do not run into difficulties over 
payments for, as I have said, I can commit myself to nothing 
before February. 

Weerth may already have written and told you that Mr Chr. 

a The Manifesto of the Cologne Central Authority of the Communist League of 
1 December 1850 drawn up by Bürgers and others. See also this volume, p. 238. 

Coilmann is not to be found at the address indicated, 58 or 59 Neue 
KGnigsstrasse or, for that matter, in Berlin, nor does anyone know 
a bookseller of that name.* Aprés tout, il parait pourtant qu’on a voulu 
nous jouer.” For the time being I shall not let Mr Bangya have any 
of the stuff back. So Schulz, the ‘commercial traveller’, and the 
dead policeman, were one and the same person after all! 

Warmest regards to your wife and children. I shall be in 
London in somewhat over a fortnight. 

Your 
F. E.