
Manuscript Was Due 30 Years Ago, University Press Still Wants It - benbreen
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Yes-Your-Manuscript-Was-Due/240833
======
Shank
> Mr. Congdon offered the author a chance to void the contract and to absolve
> himself of responsibility for the dangling project. But the writer declined,
> saying he would finish the manuscript instead.

The title is a little misleading, given that the author was given a chance to
void the contract. The title implies that it's mandatory or a requirement, but
if the author still /wants/ it published that's almost like a "university
still willing to publish after 30 years" rather than "still wants it."

~~~
GCA10
I actually read the verb "wants" in exactly the way that you prefer. Having
submitted a lot of book pitches, article pitches, etc. over the years, I'd say
"want" is generally used as an expression of interest and appreciation.

Publishers tend to revert to "expect" when they're getting testy about an
overdue manuscript. As in "When can we expect to see it?" Or "We had expected
delivery a month ago."

~~~
gmiller123456
Yes, he said "misleading" not incorrect. The vast majority of people who will
read it don't have your experience dealing with publishers, and likely won't
interpret it the way you do. I'll go further and say the title is deliberately
misleading. Since the author still wants it published too, it is deliberately
misleading to mention that one party of the contract wants it, while not
referencing the other side at all.

~~~
itp
I have no experience in publishing, and I interpreted it in the non-
misleading, entirely positive sense.

------
Someone
Meanwhile, Mr. K. (I'll afford him some privacy, lest he become the rise of
scientific publishing) hasn't finished his work on computer programming, which
was due 50 years or so ago.

Luckily for us, his editor convinced him to publish it in parts.

Morale: it often isn't laziness that makes these projects come late.

~~~
jcahill
Knuth is not going to "become the rise of scientific publishing" on the basis
of your HN comment.

~~~
shas3
Irony?

------
GCA10
If we're going down the rabbit hole of projects that take forever to complete,
I'd welcome any update about Sweden's ultimate dictionary, which was started
in 1898 and still isn't finished.

As far as I can tell, partial publication of new volumes, offering up words
that start with early letters of the alphabet, has taken us as far as V. So
the end is perhaps in sight.

But I'm guessing that a lot of Swedish usage on words starting with A, B, etc.
has changed since the initial publication. So it may be impossible to ever
come up with a dictionary that is both comprehensive and finished. The
unabridged Oxford English Dictionary had a tough fight with the same problem,
but periodic digital updates now seem to have this under control

Wikipedia entry is here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svenska_Akademiens_ordbok](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svenska_Akademiens_ordbok)

~~~
Someone
That seems on par with
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woordenboek_der_Nederlandsche_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woordenboek_der_Nederlandsche_Taal),
a similar work for Dutch, which took from 1849 to 1998 to complete. To get to
the finish, they did move the goalposts a bit by adding "as used before 1976"
at some point. It also was digitized fairly early by having two groups of
people in, IIRC, India type out a copy in duplicate and comparing the results.

(No, you don't have to speak a language to type out a manuscript)

~~~
tgb
Not knowing the language might even help in accuracy, though probably not in
speed! I've heard that copy editors would sometimes read the text backwards as
that made spelling errors more obvious. When read as part of a sentence it's
easy to skip over a spelling mistake.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Different classes of transcription error tend to come from literate vs
illiterate transcribers. I believe haplography and dittography (writing a
sequence of letters once when it should be written twice, or twice when it
should be written once) are more common from illiterate transcribers.

------
Isamu
1968: Volume One of Knuth's TAOCP: [http://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/brochure.pdf](http://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/brochure.pdf)

Planned to run to 7 volumes at that time, and volume 5 is currently "in
preparation".

~~~
antiquark
Great find, thanks! Has Knuth ever explained why he took such a long break
between volumes 3 and 4?

~~~
Isamu
He was dismayed at the declining quality of mathematical typesetting, so he
took some time to create his own system.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont)

