Letter From Bob Stubblefield - To Richard Sanford
Letter From Bob Stubblefield - To Richard Sanford
TIA Publications, Inc.
P.O. Box 262
Lincroft, NJ 07738-0262
September 7, 1995
Richard F. Sanford
800 S Wells St
Chicago IL 60607
Dear Rick,
Under my most generous interpretation of the contract we signed in July, I am bound to pay you $900 if you deliver a TIA-quality, 3000-word article on the ozone layer in time for publication in TIA for the January, 1996 issue. To this point you have not delivered such an article: TIA does not purchase any articles on an "as-is" basis. So, legally, I don't yet owe you anything.
(I do not understand why you say Paul Blair approved your draft. He had asked you to give him an essentialized outline, which would have been the first step of several layers of editing that we had planned. Both he and I thought it would take several passes to make the draft into a TIA-quality article.)
How about the moral issue? Before I learned of your agnosticism with respect to the Reismans' vicious, false statements about Leonard Peikoff, Harry Binswanger, and Peter Schwartz, I intended to invest my effort and that of TIA editor Paul Blair to work with you to turn your draft into a TIA article. Now, my preference is not to publish any article by you, to spend no energy working with you, and to pay you nothing. I hope that your decision is merely a failure on your part in understanding the issue of sanction; but in any case, I will not put TIA in the position of supporting either the Reismans or agnosticism.
If you do deliver a 3000-word article that meets TIA requirements and do not publish it somewhere else, then I think it would be fair for TIA to pay you because we asked you to produce the article in the first place. Since we will never publish the article (unless, of course, you come to understand why you should not be agnostic on the Reisman vs. Peikoff matter), it would not be fair for us to pay you and then have you publish it elsewhere. Thus, TIA will pay you $900 only if you agree to refund to TIA the first $900 you earn by publishing the article elsewhere.
If you sign a statement to that effect, TIA will mail you a check for $900.00 upon receipt of a 3000-word, TIA-quality article on the truth about the ozone "theories."
Robert W. Stubblefield
Publisher