The winter of 1977-78 was so severe that Indiana University, where I was
now a fledgling assistant professor, ran out of coal for heating, and in March
the university was forced to close down for three weeks to wait for warmer
weather. I decided to use this free time to drive to New York and points
south to see old friends. Clear as a bell in my oft-blurry memory is my brief
stop in some dingy little diner in the town of Clarion, Pennsylvania, where
from a chilly phone booth I made a quick call to Martin Kessler in New York
to see if he had a verdict yet. It was a great moment in my life when he said
he would be "delighted" to work with me - and it's almost eerie to think
that this signal event occurred in that well-named hamlet, of all places ...Revenge of the Holey Rollers
Now that I had found a publisher, there came the question of turning the
manuscript from crude computer printout to a finely typeset book. It was a
piece of true luck that Pentti, to enhance 1V-Edit, had just developed one of
the world's first computer typesetting systems, and he strongly encouraged
me to use it. Kessler, ever the adventurer, was also willing to give it a try-
partly, of course, because it would save Basic Books some money, but also
because he was by nature a shrewd risk-taker.
Do-it-yourself typesetting, though for me a great break, was hardly a
piece of cake. Computing then was a lot more primitive than it is today, and
to use Pentti's system, I had to insert into each chapter or dialogue literally
thousands of cryptic typesetting commands, next chop each computer file
into several small pieces - five or six per file, usually - each of which had
to be run through a series of two computer programs, and then each of the
resulting output files had to be punched out physically as a cryptic pattern
of myriad holes on a long, thin roll of paper tape. I myself had to walk the
200 yards to the building where the hole-puncher was located, load the
paper tape, and sit there monitoring it carefully to make sure it didn't jam.
Next, I would carry this batch of oily tapes another quarter-mile to the
building where The Stanford Daily was printed, and if it was free, I would use
their phototypesetting machine myself. Doing so was a long, elaborate
operation involving cartridges of photosensitive paper, darkrooms, chemical
baths with rollers through which the paper had to be passed to get all the
developing chemicals off, and clotheslines on which all the five-foot long
galleys with my text on them would be hung out to dry for a day or two. The
process of actually seeing what my thousands of typesetting commands had
wrought was thus enormously unwieldy and slow. Truth to tell, though, I
didn't mind that; in fact, it was arcane, special, and kind of exciting.
But one day, when nearly all the galleys had been printed - two to
three hundred of them - and I thought I was home free, I made a
horrendous discovery. I'd seen each one emerge with jet-black print from
the developing baths, and yet on some of the more recently-<iried ones, the
text looked brownish. What!? As I checked out others, slightly older, I saw
light-brown print, and on yet older ones, it was orangy, or even pale yellow!
Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-