"The clean typed copy made from #7. This is sent to Albert Erskine, and on it he does his first editorial work. A xerox will be made of this for further work. As I work over the carbon copy, herein numbered #9, I send Erskine corrected pages, which he inserts into this official copy. After months of hard work by both him and me and also by Bert Krantz, the excellent and learned copy editor, this version will go to the printer to by typeset into galleys, but by that time it won't look very much like what it did at the start, for whole new sections will have appeared, old sections will have been chopped out, and innumerable corrections by all of us will have been inserted, weighed and sometimes thrown out again. But this is the book, and the visible work showing on it proves how difficult it is to write and edit a work. "One of the most interesting aspects of this edited copy is the body of single-word changes indicated by marked-out words over which alternate words have been hand-written by Erskine in colored ink. Erskine has a very sharp ear for a word, a result of his training in poetry, and he frequently challenges my use of a word, suggesting alternatives which might come closer to my intended meaning. Three things then happen: as we edit the manuscript he brings each proposed word change to my attention and we discuss it. (l) I frequently accept the suggestion as made. (2) I occasionally prefer my own usage and reject the suggestion. (3) Quite as often we discuss six or seven alternatives, often using dictionaries or a thesaurus, and almost always we come up with the precise word we have been looking for. Lost in this process are some of the near misses I enjoy when using words in new ways. Erskine is a purist, and I often wonder what he would do if editing James Joyce or Jack Kerouac. A good portion of our editing time is spent arguing about single words, and the end result is a book with some arbitrary word usages proposed by me, some delightful precision suggested by Erskine, and many improvements. "The other interesting aspect of Erskine's editorial sessions is the application of 'Erskine's Rule.' Long ago he discovered that 'if you can't fix a wobbly passage in three tries, it will always be improved by total elimination.' We apply this frequently, and always with first-rate results. He has a nice eye for the sentence which has ended two clauses before the writer thought to. I have a tantalizing delight in the long run-on sentence that combines many contraries and yields an unexpected conclusion. THIS COPY MUST NOT BE OPEN TO THE PUBLIC UNTIL TWO YEARS AFTER PUBLICATION DATE.