Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/6

 

ERE IT IS, readers, in spite of Hell and High Water! The special Shaver Mystery issue! And if you think that first sentence isn't sincere, you should have been in this editorial office to help put the June issue to bed! Never in our nine years of editing have such fantastic things happened to make an issue almost impossible. As a result, many small details, many planned features, do not appear; our plans are not complete; the issue is not what we wanted it to be. But the major portion is there, and with a little study, you will see all that we intended to convey, and understand it.

ERHAPS a brief recital of what happened may give you some idea of the impossibility of these things being entirely natural. First, in our nine years, a certain standard of progress has been set up between printer and publisher in the mechanics of getting out a magazine. This standard is religiously maintained. A "deadline" is the "bible" on which all actions are founded. To miss a deadline is the cardinal sin. Thus, to begin with, manuscripts, properly edited, go to the typesetter at least three weeks in advance of "press date." In this case, press date was March 13. Manuscripts went to the typesetter on February 19. They should have been delivered on February 26 in galley form, ready for page make-up. They were set up (as provable by the date at the head of each galley set in type by the typesetter) on February 20 and 21. Yet, they were not delivered to this office until March 5. Why? Because no one could locate them! They had apparently vanished into thin air. And yet, when they were finally found, they were exactly where they should have been, in the proper location, with all the proper identification to locate them instantly. When they were delivered, they were almost entirely useless, because, ranging from just a few dozen typographical errors, to as many as 92 in four inches of type, they required complete resetting of all vital passages! Even more mysterious that otherwise almost letter-perfect typographers should set so atrociously, the proofreaders who received that copy for checking, found no errors! They could look at a page with 92 errors in it, and see none. Or, as is more likely, somehow those proofs were not proofread. When this was suggested to the department heads, the comment was: "Ridiculous!" On page 129 you will find reproduced a specific passage which you can check for yourself against pages 156, 157 and 158 where the correct copy appears, exactly as it was in the manuscript. You explain those errors. The man who set it could not!

EXT, there were numerous instances of duplicate galleys inserted, which, if included in the makeup, would necessitate complete remaking of the page forms if not discovered in the first makeup. Other galleys were incorrectly numbered. Certain galleys mysteriously disappeared, and yet the numbers were correct, and did not show a missing galley where one really was. The sense of particular passages was subtly changed by minor errors which were hard to catch by any proofreader not entirely familiar with the Mystery because they seemed to make proper sense and continuity. Thus, all proofreading had to be done by your editor himself, and by Mr. Hamling, the only other man in this office who could detect such a subtle change.

E AREN'T going to mention the hundred other things that happened to delay everything possible—the dozens of almost maliciously planned (so it seemed) interruptions from every conceivable source, the case of nerves we developed which made it impossible to type a single line that wasn't full of typographical errors; the consequent retyping and "messy" editing we had to do, all of which made the typographer's job the more confusing; the errors in titles painted into illustrations by the art department (such as "Witche's Daughter" instead of "Witch's Daughter" as it should be); the critical paper shortage that developed on this issue and on no other; the misplacing of work already done, so that it had to be done over, only to have the original work turn up in plain view exactly where you had placed it and had looked for it. We could go on, but we have more important things to put in this space. We only mention what we have as just one more proof (?) that Shaver isn't the only one who has what he calls "tamper."

OW for the stories in this issue, all by Shaver. First, "Formula From The Underworld." This story is completely fiction—except for its description of the caves. All that is completely true, says Shaver—and true because he says he has seen it many times over the ray, and some times in (Continued on page 8) 6