Volume 4A of Knuth's TAOCP Finally In Print 173
jantangring writes "It's been 28 years since Volume 3 of Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming was published. The book series is a classic work of computer science in spite of the fact that still more than half of the seven volume series is still to be finalized. In 1992 Donald Knuth retired to medieval monkness in order to finish his work. After many long years in draft, volume 4A now in print and you can get it in a boxed set if you don't mind admitting that you don't already own the first three volumes. They won't be checking if you read it."
Who else hasn't read his copy of volume three? (Score:5, Funny)
Who else hasn't read his copy of volume three?
Re:Who else hasn't read his copy of volume three? (Score:5, Funny)
I have read his copy of volume three. The sheer walls of his retreat were quite a challenge but the rest of it was easy.
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It's not a novel you have either read or not read.
It's more like an encyclopaedia, where you read what you need or want, and quite often read some more to get the background.
Now I wish they would sell 4A + the empty box, so I could upgrade my 1-3. But my guess is that the publishers haven't read the books, and didn't plan for upgrades.
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I came into programming from a math background. Every time I try to read his books, the programming stuff is wonderful and then he writes something about a math problem or two and I lose a week of my life.
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Why not buy 4A, get some cardboard and make your own box, if the box is that important? I'd be happy to just have them on a shelf, if I had a bookshelf. Just now it's more of a jumble of piles.
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Now I wish they would sell 4A + the empty box, so I could upgrade my 1-3. But my guess is that the publishers haven't read the books, and didn't plan for upgrades.
Its a CS computer science book. Something like "apt-get dist-upgrade" is mostly appreciated by IT people not CS people. Bonus if you understand why its apt-get dist-upgrade instead of apt-get upgrade, unless you plan on keeping your old box (for kindling?)
Re:Who else hasn't read his copy of volume three? (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently Steve Jobs for one:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Close_Encounters_of_the_Steve_Kind.txt [folklore.org]
William
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Volume 3's the good stuff! It's volume 2 I've never done more than skim. (Though I do have to admit that the analysis of balanced ternary in vol2 was fascinating, but not very practical in the real world where computers use binary.)
Re:Who else hasn't read his copy of volume three? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've actually leaned on both volumes 2 and 3. The discussions about floating point and number systems are very useful in Volume 2. The sorting and searching networks in Volume 3 are must-have reading if you're trying to do complex sorting functions on highly parallel machines. (Think median filters, for an example, particularly in the context of sub-word SIMD.)
I read the first couple draft fascicles for Volume 4A, and see a bunch in there I can directly apply to other work I do, such as exhaustively evaluating portions of a larger search space. Also, some of the Boolean logic properties are very interesting.
Fun fact: It turns out that during the exact same month (March 2007?), both Knuth and I attacked essentially the same problem. We both set out to find minimal instruction sequences to implement all Boolean functions of 5 variables. I didn't find this out until well after the fact, while hunting through his website looking for a new Volume 4 fascicle. We actually had fairly similar results, but his approach was far more elegant (naturally). Also, mine was constrained to tree-like sequences and a specific target instruction set, whereas his permitted any DAG and used more generic Boolean operations. (For example, I had a "not-and" operation which does "A and not B", whereas I don't think he did.) Still, it was rather amusing to see we had both tackled the same problem at about the same time, and came up with similar overall results.
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The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4A, The Combinatorial Algorithms, Part 1
Sounds interesting, but I don't think I have time to read it now.
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I haven't. Too busy playing video games, programming VHDL or verilog, and working 70+ hour weeks. So is it worth the $200 pricetag? (Volumes 1-3 Boxset plus Volume 4, fasciles 1-5)
No. You can download Volumes 1-3 off the net for free.
70 hour weeks suck but hopefully only temporary.
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No. You can download Volumes 1-3 off the net for free.
Maybe, but this isn't the MPAA or RIAA you're dealing with. This man is a genius and an extraordinary teacher by all accounts. I have no doubt that many of the texts you've read about algorithms who weren't authored by him directly were still influenced by his works. By not paying for the books you're showing no gratitude for his life long works which have and will unquestionably benefit programmers including yourself (and by extension, society) for years, possibly even decades or centuries to come.
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I thought the model these days was: give your stuff for free and get bought by Oracle. And who would want to do that?!
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That said, I'm not sure where Knuth is likely to stand on this, not so much because of the people reading for free, but rather because pirated scans are ugly. Knuth spent ten years on a sidetrack just to build a world class mathematical typesetting sy
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The library paid for the copy that is being borrowed. So they are not in any way similar.
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Totally off topic. Have you checked out the 1541U-II? Great expansion device for the Commodore 64, with open source firmware written in VHDL.
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I have the first 3 boxed (Score:2)
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Volume 4 only took 28 years to create.
Imagine how long it would have taken him, if Knuth had an email account [stanford.edu] and had to read email every day!
Re:I have the first 3 boxed (Score:5, Funny)
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Thank the gods he doesn't have Facebook. I've been trying to get back into programming in the evenings, but have to stop every 5 minutes to check Facebook and Slashdot.. stupid addictive personality.
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My role is to be on the bottom of things (Score:2)
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.
I'd ask if this guy is a native English speaker, but his wikipedia page says he's originally from Milwaukee, WI.
Now, I've heard of both:
Being on top of things
and
Getting to the bottom of thigns
but I've never heard of someone wanting to "be on the bottom of things." This image conjures up pictures either suitable for prison life or a procrastinator's paradise; possibly both
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Now you can get the fourth part of the trilogy (credit: Douglas Adams).
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Well, technically, it's the 3 1/2th part of the trilogy, since this is just Volume 4A.
For my part, I'll hold off buying until Volume 4 is actually complete. Assuming the world survives 2012 and Y2G [wikipedia.org].
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Just want to point out that .... (Score:2, Insightful)
I just want to point out that these books are called "The Art of Computer Programming" and not:
The Art of Software Engineering.
The Art of Computer Science
or The Art of [insert some pretentious title]
And even without and pretentious term for what it is, it is still taken quite seriously and nobody disparages it.
You don't have to be called an engineer or scientist to be taken seriously.
Re:Just want to point out that .... (Score:4, Insightful)
General public's view of:
Programmer: A fat guy behind a PC making Facebook and Google.
Engineer: An intelligent construction worker.
Scientist: A guy doing pointless research just so he can say he does research.
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"Programmer: A fat guy behind a PC making Facebook and Google."
Actually,
Programmer: A fat guy behind a PC making Facebook and Google giggle.
Somehow it seems better that way.
It must be admitted... (Score:3)
From Vol 1: "However, it must be admitted that MIX is now quite obsolete. Therefore MIX will be replaced in subsequent editions of this book by a new machine called MMIX, the 2009.
I take it Vol 4A is still MIX with 6-bit bytes?
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Re:It must be admitted... (Score:5, Informative)
...and until Vol.1 is updated:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html [stanford.edu]
'As I continue to write Volumes 4 and 5, I'll need to refer to topics that belong logically in Volumes 1--3 but weren't invented yet when I wrote those books. Instead of putting such material artificially into Volumes 4 or 5, I'll put it into fascicle form. The first such fascicle is in fact ready now (see above): It describes MMIX, a RISC machine that is used in Volume 4A; MMIX will also take the place of MIX in all subsequent editions of Volumes 1, 2, and 3.
Download the 16 Feb 2004 version of Volume 1 Fascicle 1 (583KB of compressed PostScript) (this old version is however no longer being maintained)':
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/fasc1.ps.gz [stanford.edu]
Re:It must be admitted... (Score:5, Informative)
there's several erratas on his website, one of those is exactly about MMIX.
site [stanford.edu]
fascicle 1: MMIX [stanford.edu] (compressed postscript).
on the site he tells which parts of volume 1 are replaced by the fascicle.
Most used (Score:3)
Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)
Given the $$$ for the boxed set, which was way more than a poor college/post college programmer could afford, I promised myself I'd get these books when volume 4 came out. Over the years I've read through and copied, a lot of times by hand, his algorithms while sitting at B&N or someplace, and I always would finish by saying "Why don't I just buy this and save me the trouble?" Then suddenly everything was on the internet, and I could refer back to my notes, and then I didn't need to look at my notes any longer, but I kept wanting to buy the books, if anything to show gratitude. Now that the 4th is out, I'm going to do it.
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And you'll buy the boxed set again when 4B comes out, followed by 4C?
And again when he releases the planned vol 5?
And again when he gets around to going back to redoing vol 1 2 and 3 in MMIX and releasing the 4th edition?
And again if he gets around to his planned Vol 6 and Vol 7?
Personally, I'll stick to the individual volumes (hopefully he will issue the changes to vol2 and vol3 as fascicles as he did with the Vol 1 Fascicle 1 release defining MMIX)
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In which boxed set does Han Solo shoot first?
Pigs flying, hell freezing over (Score:5, Funny)
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You left out that the Verizon iPhone.. All the Tech Unicorns are now showing up.
That being side Vol. 4 of The Art of Computer Programing is the most interesting for me.
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You left out that the Verizon iPhone.. All the Tech Unicorns are now showing up.
not all. the white iphone 4 is still the subject of legend.
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I had forgotten about the white iPhone. It may be the last unicorn of this generation of tech. That and a good cheap Android Tablet.
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Notice that they don't have a picture of it...
It still has not shipped anywhere as far as I can tell so it is still a unicorn.
Why anyone cares I have no idea but for some reason they do.
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Re:Pigs flying, hell freezing over (Score:4, Funny)
If the end of the earth is not this year then it is definatly next year.
Re:Pigs flying, hell freezing over (Score:4, Funny)
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>> Donald Knuth has published a book and a date has been set for the release of Duke Nukem Forever?
I guess this pretty much proves that hexagons just aren't that much fun in Civ5.
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"Donald Knuth has published a book and a date has been set for the release of Duke Nukem Forever? It's all too much."
There's more yet, Freebsd is getting a new installer.
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2011-January/022335.html [freebsd.org]
Will we stand the strain?
The Freebsd guys better announce it in big bold letters everywhere to cut down on the potential heart attacks as the shock may be too much for some.
Satan just asked Mary to stop by for a quick warm-up(he he) as hell just froze over.
Good God w
So was Charlie Stross wrong? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So was Charlie Stross wrong? (Score:4, Funny)
It's only Volume 4A. Algorithms to generate Dho-Nha geometry curves in polynomial time aren't covered until Volume 4C, so he's safe for the moment.
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Remain metabolically active? You mean they'd put him in some sort of suspended animation? Cryo-freeze perhaps?
In a way. He's saying they'd put him on ice.
I'm hangin' out (Score:2)
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Getting this Right Away(tm) (Score:2)
I'm preordaining this so I can have a chance at finding a mistake and getting a reward check.
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Cool! Now we can call it the Reverend Volume 4A.
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I'm preordaining this so I can have a chance at finding a mistake and getting a reward check.
You don't have to race to find errors in Dr. Knuth's books. He's certainly detailed and careful, but no volume as large and complicated as his can escape small errors.
I got two checks from him (back when they were real checks) just from Digital Typography (a book I highly recommend).
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I got two checks from him (back when they were real checks) just from Digital Typography (a book I highly recommend).
Did you ever cash them? I always hear that the people who got them never cashed them. I always thought that it must be a pain in the ass for Knuth to balance his checkbook with all those uncleared checks. :)
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The reason GPP said "back when they were real checks" is because so few people actually cashed them that when it became clear that there were security problems with telling everyone your bank account number, Knuth started issuing cheques from the Bank of San Serriffe. If you really prefer the money you can trade it back in, but mine is framed above my computer.
Hey, that's my University getting a nod in there! (Score:2)
Pretty hot to see this bump for the old Alma Mater:
check the fine print at the bottom:
http://www.utdallas.edu/news/2010/10/28-6621_Computer-Scientists-Make-Progress-on-Math-Puzzle_article.html
wtf 28? (Score:2, Funny)
Volume 3 was first published in 1973. That is 38 years ago. Also, the first (incomplete) paperback edition of volume 4 was published in 2005. In 2011, volume 4 is still not complete. Wtf 28 years? Please don't post again until the whole series is complete.
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Volume 3 was first published in 1973. That is 38 years ago. Also, the first (incomplete) paperback edition of volume 4 was published in 2005. In 2011, volume 4 is still not complete. Wtf 28 years? Please don't post again until the whole series is complete.
The series will never be complete. Besides the fact that Knuth is getting on in years, there's the little problem that computer science continues advancing, which has required Knuth to revise the existing volumes in addition to working on writing the new ones.
None of which affects the value of the existing volumes in the slightest, of course.
Original the best (Score:2)
Part 1 was the best. Reloaded & Revolutions were OK. I hope 4A is better.
the sad thing (Score:2)
Knuths' books used to be the dope, now they're more like the antidote. Most code monkeys these days are consumed by hacking their way through the jungle overgrowth and not losing sight of the sky (33 million lines of code in Helios). We've become so engaged by the canopy, we actually forget the soil has worms. There are times when it would be useful to regain this awareness.
As fascinating as the worms are, most code monkeys have poor digestive capacity for worms. Those of us who are ecologists rather th
0x4A ? (Score:2)
Side question (Score:2)
Wow (Score:2)
Am I right my assumption that there may be as many as 8 volumes of Volume 4?
Re:Wow --- volume 4BXz? (Score:5, Funny)
Right now, tex (written by Knuth) is at version number 3.141592.
Following the same pattern, we may get a boxed library of programming books from Knuth without ever reaching volume 5.
Re:Wow --- volume 4BXz? (Score:5, Informative)
I had to check to see if you were kidding! And actually:
ali@katamari:~$ tex --version
TeX 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2009/Debian)
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Re:Wow --- volume 4BXz? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Wrong. The new version number will be larger than the previous one, obviously, by 5e-8. And even if you read the number as 3.integer, the new integer has one more digit than the old one. Why do you think it should be lower?
By the way, TeX version numbers are converging to pi, and Metafont version numbers are converging to e. This is intentional. Rumor has it that this should show how TeX and Metafont converge to perfection.
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You fail math forever.
3.1415927 is indeed greater than 3.14159265
Consequently, the poster is correct. If the current version number were rounded instead of truncated, the next version would indeed have a lower number than the previous version. This is why the poster (correctly) pointed out that rounding would have been a mistake.
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Am I right my assumption that there may be as many as 8 volumes of Volume 4?
Given the subject matter it will be more like 4! / 3
Re:Boxed set (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a new feature. You buy the book, read it, and then sell it on ebay or amazon as "like new/mint" condition to recoup ~90% of your money. --- or --- If you like the book you can keep it forever without having to fear someone will delete it from your kindle. You can even pass it on to your children! Personally I think this is an improvement.
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You haven't sold many books, have you?
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I've sold a lot of books (and games). Some I lose money and some I gain money. My overall "loss" this past year was just $50 for about 500 items bought-and-later sold on the ebay/amazon.
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Yes, our financial empire will begin when we resell a physical copy of Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming" on eBay. Isn't this the same site that spent years mocking CDs for being an obsolete business model?
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The best part is, book works with the shelves you have at home. No need to get a new storage device.
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Deleting it from a Kindle, as opposed to throwing away the physical book, losing it, or physically damaging it in some way? Not to mention that printing it on paper and packaging it as a book costs more. The advantages of digital distribution outweigh physical distribution so hugely that whining about reselling some old book is silly. This is the same Slashdot that mocks CDs for being an "obsolete business model."
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Yes digital distribution IS cheaper.
For THEM but not for me. For me the physical hardback is cheaper cause I can buy it for ~$20 and sell it for $18-19, and therefore my total cost is just 1-2 dollars. In contrast the Kindle version would cost $20.
Re:Boxed set (Score:4, Insightful)
But more seriously - it would make far more sense to buy this as an e-book that I can search on my computer wherever I am.
I do enough of my programming from home or from a coffee shop that it'd be rather useless to have these things stuck on my office bookshelf (except, perhaps to look a bit pretentious).
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But more seriously - it would make far more sense to buy this as an e-book that I can search on my computer wherever I am.
I do enough of my programming from home or from a coffee shop that it'd be rather useless to have these things stuck on my office bookshelf (except, perhaps to look a bit pretentious).
Kindle / etc / generally seems to suffer under the load of large equations and diagrams. OK for the latest Tom Clancy or Gibbons decline and fall of the roman empire, not so hot for this application.
If you're talking about PDFs of Knuths work to read on the laptop, those are, uh, available, from the usual sources.
Personally I was more excited to receive the final (?) eighth collection of Knuths papers that being the "fun and games". Got it in the mail last week, barely cracked open yet. Has his "famous"
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Re:Boxed set (Score:5, Funny)
Hack the e-reader to install Linux.
Install Perl.
The rest is left as an exercise to the student.
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Expensively. It's all part of the conspiracy to get you to upgrade!
Re:Dead Serious Question (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Dead Serious Question (Score:5, Informative)
The 3 first volumes of "The art of computer programming" were for many years the de-facto reference for learning about data structures and algorithms using a rigorous approach.
The problems given at the end of each chapter are comprehensive and often very difficult, which make the series challenging and particularly interesting.
Today there are much better textbooks if you simply want to learn about algorithms. The TAOCP series demonstrates implementations using MIX, a made-up assembly language which is quite frankly, horrible. However, this doesn't change the fact that the series was a huge contribution to the field, and still has its merits.
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When you consider that the copyright date in my copies of V1 & V2 are 1968,72 and 1968,73, and 1980 for V3, it is amazing that these books are still of use.
It is hardly surprising that MIX is a little "odd" by the standards of today - it would be like comparing Mercury autocode with C#
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You can always identify people whom have never read Knuth because they get hung up on it not using the hot new language of the month. "Now with Erlang!"
On the other hand, the people that "read" Knuth but didn't understand any of it, get even by complaining about the magnetic tape merge scenarios, and "doesn't everyone just use the qsort routine anyway?"
The folks whom "get it" understand its not training, but education.
Re:Dead Serious Question (Score:4, Funny)
I had trouble following your post because every reading of one of your flagrant misuses of "whom" resulted in a cascade of aneurysms. These caused me to pause and foam at the mouth a little bit. I later regained consciousness and was able to continue reading. And then bam, another misuse of "whom"! I don't know if I will ever recover.
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The final "its" is what caused the stroke though.
[John]
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He's a time-travelling anti-software patent crusader from the distant future. He travelled to the dawn of the computer age to publish a set of books containing all the algorithms known throughout time to establish prior art. Unfortunately, most people don't read his books and thus we're still troubled by software patents.
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He needs to buck up and get a move on. He was born in 1938, at this rate he'll be long dead before he finishes...
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You now have 4 data points, so can someone draw a plot to see when the next volume is coming out?
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Yes, he does intend to finish.
You have to understand that when he was first asked to write this ``book'' he wrote out longhand ~600 pages and submitted that as the first chapter --- when his editor received this manuscript he asked in response, ``Don, just how long is this book going to be?'' --- after a bit of back-and-forth they worked out that the first submission would be the bulk of Vol. 1 and planned out the balance of the volumes. Then the Monotype casting machines were retired and he took a bit of t