¶ Fuller, R.B.: On Galley Proofs
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Fuller, R.B.: On Galley Proofs:
"I met with Bruce Carrick today from Macmillan and I told him that Thornton Wilder (who was a mathematician though many people didn’t know it) said that my mathematics book-- if it is right-- would be more important than Newton’s.“Principia.” … Now we know that it is right and so tactically it is more important than the “Principia”-- the Greatest Book. I talked Navy to him as a young man and told him I was rather miffed at being stood up for lunch Monday. I told him about our requirements for color plates and he agreed.
“I explained to him in some detail about my method of composition. How a thing is clear, when I write it down on paper. and how much clearer it is again when it comes back after you (EJA) have typed it up. But you really can see vastly more only after it has come back to you as galley proofs. That’s when the real writing can begin. This is not a question of being careless. I explained about meeting Winston Churchill’s secretary at the N.Y. World’s Fair and how we both had to go through seven drafts. Churchill had his speeches and other drafts set up as galleys. With me, my use of galleys is not facetious: it is part of the process of being adequate and thorough.”
