Thought I'd get in early on the fun. Ms. Deb Houdek Rule, who Bill has known for about eight years now, and who the author was kind enough to nod his kingly head in her direction in the Acknowledgements, would Like it Known that her name for formal purposes is "Debra", not "Deborah".

OK -- here's a good place to dump this before I forget it. In the bio (Vol. 1) I took Forry Ackerman's testimony that he met Heinlein a few weeks before "Life-Line" came out as indicating that Heinlein joined LASFS in the summer of 1939, but Heinlein's letter of congratulations to the LASFS on moving into their new clubhouse says he joined in December 1938 or January 1939, and that 4SJ at that meeting announced that Unknown would be coming on the stands within a few weeks (i.e., the March 1939 issue showed up on newstands in February 1939).

I find it hard to reconcile these two accounts, as the natural explanation -- that he did not meet 4e until they met accidentally at Shep's Shop (i.e., six or seven months after seeing him at LASFS) -- is quite unlikely, given the small size of LASFS at that time.

I am tempted to comment on the sample pages on Google Books, but I think it would be wiser to wait for the hardcopy...

I believe Google's copy may be derived from an advance reading copy, possibly uncorrected. One clue: the author's name is misspelled on the cover.

Yup -- when they said "uncorrected" bound galleys, they weren't kidding. I thought it was a very premature stage to issue bound galleys and it needed at least one more pass, but the two sets of galleys were what they usually do. The previous stage was the copyedited ms, into which the copyeditor had introduced literally thousands of new errors.

There were over 300 fixes that had to be made from the bound galleys, most of them fomat corrections where a quote less than 3 lines in typset had an extra line space in the middle of text. There was some substantive revision in text and notes, as I recall, plus elimination of some notes that had become duplicative or supererogatory.

I've never seen a clean, printable galley.