At Stanford, my erstwhile "pamphlet" bloomed. It was rewritten from
start to finish, because I felt that my earlier drafts, though focused on the
proper ideas, were immature and inconsistent in style. And I enjoyed the
luxury of one of the world's earliest and best word-processing programs, my
new friend Pentti KanelVa's tremendously flexible and user-friendly 1V-Edit.
Thanks to that program, the new version just flowed out, and ever so
smoothly. I just can't imagine how GEB could have been written without it.
Only at this stage did the book's unusual stylistic hallmarks really
emerge - the sometimes-silly playing with words, the concocting of novel
verbal structures that imitate musical forms, the wallowing in analogies of
every sort, the spinning of stories whose very structures exemplify the points
they are talking about, the mixing of oddball personalities in fantastic
scenarios. As I was writing, I certainly knew that my book would be quite
different from other books on related topics, and that I was violating quite a
number of conventions. Nonetheless I blithely continued, because I felt
confident that what I was doing simply had to be done, and that it had an
intrinsic rightness to it. One of the key qualities that made me so believe in
what I was doing is that this was a book in which form was being given equal
billing with content - and that was no accident, since GEB is in large part
about how content is inseparable from form, how semantics is of a piece
with syntax, how inextricable pattern and matter are from each other.
Although I had always known of myself that, in many aspects of life, I
was concerned as much with form as with content, I had never suspected
how deeply I would get caught up, in the writing of my first book, in matters
of visual appearance on all levels. Thus, thanks to the ease of using 1V-Edit,
whatever I wrote underwent polishing to make it look better on the screen,
and though such control would at one time have been considered a luxury
for an author, I was very attached to it and loath to give it up. By the time I
had a solid version of the manuscript ready to send out to publishers, visual
design and conceptual structure were intimately bound up with each other.
The Clarion CallI've oft been asked if I, an unknown author with an unorthodox manuscript
and an off-the-wall title, had to struggle for years against the monolithic
publishing industry's fear of taking risks. Well, perhaps I was just lucky, but
my experience was far more pleasant than that.
In mid-1977, I sent out a little sample to about fifteen high-quality
publishers, just as a feeler, to which most replied politely that this was "not
the type of thing" they dealt in. Fair enough. But three or four expressed
interest in seeing more, and so, by turns, I let them take a look at the whole
thing. Needless to say, I was disappointed when the first two turned it down
(and in each case the vetting process took a few months, so the loss of time
was frustrating), but on the other hand, I wasn't overly disheartened. Then
near Christmastime, Martin Kessler, head of Basic Books, a publishing outfit
I had always admired, gave me some hopeful though tentative signals.P-12 Twentieth-anniversary Preface