November 1, 1930

Mr. James S. Thompson, Vice-President,

McGraw-Hill Book Co.,

370 Seventh Ave., New York.

Dear Mr. Thompson:

I regret that my travels this summer have caused this long delay in answering your letter relative to author corrections on "The Structure of Line Spectra."

You have written that the original composition cost $647.83, the total author corrections $429.63, of which you suggest $150 might be charged to us. On the face of it this seems not unreasonable. On the other hand, I do not feel that Professor Goudsmit and I were at all careless or negligent in preparing the manuscript or correcting the proofs, and I would object strongly to accepting a substantial decrease in the already small sum of money that the book will bring us based on such a claim.

Without knowing whether or not they have been included under the heading author corrections, I wish to make some remarks about certain items which may have been so classified.

I. Section 57 and Appendices III and IV, amounting to about sixteen pages, were added after type had been set. No change in the rest of the book was necessitated by this, however, and as far as I can see the expense of printing these parts was exactly the same as if the material had accompanied the original manuscript.

II. Certain detailed corrections extending throughout the book should not, I feel, be laid at our door.

a. We had indicated hold-face italics for vectors. The proof-reader asked on the first group of galleys whether or not we were willing to change to bold-face roman, to make uniformity with the other books of the series. I answered at once in the affirmative; despite which fact all succeeding galleys were first set up in italics, and had to be changed.

b. Every footnote in the manuscript was in the style of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and we attached to page 1 of the manuscript an explicit request that they be so set up. However, someone in your office went through the entire manuscript, changing every footnote into a completely different style.

Original style: L.S. Onrstein and H.C.Burger, Z.f.Phys ., 28, 135 (1924).

Changed style: Ornstein, L.S., and H.C.Burger, Z.f.Phys., 28:135, 1924.

Thompson-2 11-1-30

This change occurred in all galleys. Although dissatisfied with this style and irritated at the scant courtesy given our request, we felt that rather than put you to the expense of resetting we would accept these footnotes, and so we contented ourselves with making one correction, putting initials before names throughout.

c. Many changes in punctuation were made in the manuscript (usually extra commas being inserted). These we changed back.

III. The only extensive changes in proof were in Chapter IX. These consisted largely of additions (to Secs. 50a, 52, and 53). Only two or three pages of type (old Sec. 53) had to be removed. These changes were made necessary by important advances in hyper-fine structure during the summer of 1929, and the chapter as written is now the most satisfactory part of the book, for it is the only up-to-date treatment of this important subject in any book or journal. Those changes were not occasioned by negligence on our part, and the improvement they made in the book is of as much advantage to the publishers as to the authors.

I accordingly request that the question of author corrections be again discussed, with consideration of the fore-going facts. In any case, the author corrections should be divided between Professor Goudsmit and me in the ratio 1 to 3, as are the royalties.

Very truly yours,

Linus Pauling

LP:M