Manuscript Was Due 30 Years Ago, University Press Still Wants It | Hacker News Reader

Manuscript Was Due 30 Years Ago, University Press Still Wants It

chronicle.com

56 pointsbenbreen20 comments

> 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."

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."

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.

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

It's not misleading - it's vague.

Could go either way but it's intent seems to match one of the meanings and many people read it that way.

The vagueness is what tripped up OP

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.

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

I expect that was a joke.

Irony?

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

There's a Sanskrit to English Dictionary project (An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Sanskrit on Historical Principles) going on at Deccan College, Pune — it started in 1948, and as of 2010 was still on the first letter "a" (either 8[1] or 30[2] volumes published already though). If it keeps up the pace it may take longer than the Swedish dictionary :-) There's a sample (part of an) entry from it available online[3].

[1] http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/60-years-later-sanskri...

[2] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/pune/Now-refer-to-an...

[3] http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/scans/awork/homepag...

That seems on par with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woordenboek_der_Nederlandsche_..., 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)

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.

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.

1968: Volume One of Knuth's TAOCP: 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".

I've often referred to TeX as the result of the most awesome case of procrastination in the history of humanity.

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

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/Metafont

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