Publication InformationWashington Dec 25 48

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Dear Baird

I send you by this mail, in four envelopes, 250 pages or so of a book Garrigue wants translated. It is the explanatory text of Brockhaus Bilder-Atlas, & will make 1000 pp or more. G. proposed to me to under take it which I declined, after proper reservations touching my own superior qualifications, recommended you as the best person to

do the work. G. will pay well, I $1 per page of printed matter, or thereabouts. Will you translate it, correcting, continuing, & annotating, to some small extent? If yea, write G forthwith, & give your terms & time. If nay, send him his books through me, & write him. In any case, write forthwith.

It is said there is here a young German in the court survey office quite competent to make the translation, but . Lucky you, and I, whose fame ringeth so loud and clear! Yea, our names, thinketh Garrigue, will sell anything, &

therefore he speeketh, (N. B. this is Scottish) whether, if you will not translate, you will revise, correct, extend, & annotate, putting your name on the title page? Write without delay and put the poor man out of pain. Love to Mary.

Yours trulyG P Marsh

References in this letter:

Charles Rudolph Garrigue, a New York publisher, obtained the plates to F. A. Brockhaus's Bilder Atlas zum Conversations Lexicon (Leipzig) with the intention of republishing them with an English text. Marsh suggested that Baird translate and revise the work. It was a massive undertaking on which Baird spent four years. Published in 1852 as The Iconographic Encyclopedia of Science, Literature, and Art, it established Baird's reputation.