I couldn't believe it. How in the world had this happened? The simple
answer left me feeling so angry and helpless: the aging rollers, having worn
unevenly, no longer wiped the galleys clean, so acid was day by day eating
the black print away. For the Daily's purposes, this didn't matter - they
chucked their galleys in a matter of hours - but for a book, it spelled
disaster. No way could a book be printed from yellow galleys! And the
photocopies r d made of them when they were newborn were sharp, but not
sharp enough. What a nightmare! Untold labor had just gone up in smoke.
I was filled with the despair of a football team that's just made a 99-yard
downfield march only to be stopped dead on the opponent's one-yard line.
r d spent almost all summer 1978 producing these galleys, but now
summer was drawing to a close, and I had to go back to Indiana to teach
courses. What on earth to do? How could I salvage GEB? The only solution
I could see was, on my own money, to fly back to Stanford every weekend of
the fall, and redo the whole thing from scratch. Luckily, I was teaching only
on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and so each Thursday afternoon I would zoom
from class, catch a plane, arrive at Stanford, work like a maniac until
Monday afternoon, and then dash off to the airport to return to Indiana. I
will never forget the worst of those weekends, when I somehow managed to
work for forty hours straight without a wink of sleep. That's love for you!
In this ordeal there was a saving grace, though, and it was this: I got to
correct all the typesetting errors I'd made in the first batch of galleys. The
original plan had been to use a bunch of correction galleys, which would
have had to be sliced up into little pieces in Basic's New York offices and
pasted in wherever there were glitches - and in that first batch I'd made
glitches galore, that's for sure. Such a process would probably have resulted
in hundreds of errors in the layout. But thanks to my 99-yard drive having
been halted at the one-yard line, I now had the chance to undo all these
glitches, and produce a nearly pristine set of galleys. And thus, although the
chemical catastrophe delayed the actual printing of GEB for a couple of
months, it turned out, in retrospect, to have been a blessing in disguise.
Oops ...
There were of course many ideas that vied with each other for entry into the
book taking shape during those years, and some made it in while others did
not. One of the ironies is that the Einstein-book dialogue, which in its
"fugality" was the inspiration for all dialogues to come, was chopped.
There was another long and intricate dialogue, too, that was chopped,
or more accurately, that wound up getting transmogrified nearly beyond
recognition, and its curious story is connected with an intense debate that
was raging inside my brain at that time.
I had been made acutely aware, by some leaflets I'd read in the student
union at Oregon in 1970, of sexist language and its insidious unconscious
effects. My mind was awakened to the subtle ways that generic "he" and
"man" (and a host of similar words and phrases) contribute to the shapingP-14 Twentieth-anniversary Preface