The Second Edition

September 20, 2005

Although the first edition sold well, compared to the usual market for such books, it was not a critical success among the people whose opinion I value most. In revising it, I undertook a complete reorganization of the book along topical lines rather than cultural. I also made a search through the literature to find out what the experts have to say. I can't be sure I avoided all mistakes this way, but I do firmly believe that the new edition is a vast improvement on the first one.

The website you are now looking at is the home page for the second edition. Here I intend to publish corrections and retractions, criticism, and outtakes to fill in the story of the second edition. Basically this website consists of the following four areas.

Er...what I meant to say was.... There is something about that final in-print version that causes all those gremlins that lurked between the lines and hid from sight when you were proofreading leap right off the page and into your face. Anyway, I have recently found some typographical errors that I missed and a few places where I wasn't concentrating hard enough when I wrote. You can avoid the frustration of trying to work out what I must have meant if you look at this list of corrections.

The cutting room floor... This website provides something like the "director's edition" of the work. I had gathered material enough for a book of a thousand pages and would have written such a book cheerfully, but I had to consider what a publisher would go for. It was just as well that I had to cut the book down. A man my age really does need to remember "time's wingéd chariot." Here's a list of links to the material that didn't quite make the cut.

We learn from our critics... Painful though it will be for me, if I read criticism of the book that I can't refute, I'll acknowledge it here with profuse apologies for having misinformed my readers. The defects of my book are due entirely to my ignorance.... Those I have found so far can be reached by clicking here.

The teacher's corner... If you'd like a copy of a solutions manual that I wrote, just send me an e-mail. Without any further trouble at all, you can download my suggested solutions to the odd-numbered problems.