McPhee has included the following text in the publishing contract for each of his books since 1994. He says it applies to all his work.<\/p>\n
\nIt is my wish that future editors respect my thoughts about various matters like inches versus centimetres and miles versus kilometres and the choice in which altitude is expressed and personal habits of punctuation and so forth. In the case of the units of measure, I have used both (but mainly the English system) because we are living in a time of transition, and, in the United States at the moment, both apply. Sometimes, to express that fact indirectly\u2014and for rhythm, and for other considerations\u2014I have used metric measurements in one part of a sentence and English measurements in another. But never do I say something like \u201cseventeen miles (27.359 kilometres)\u201d because that is oafish, and I hope and pray that no sentence of mine is ever \u201cimproved\u201d in such manner by a well-meaning editor who doctors my texts so that the two forms of measurement are presented in linear translation. Equally, I would spin in my grave if such an editor were to change an English measurement to a metric measurement, ruining whatever flow and rhythm the sentence in its original form managed to achieve. If something is in inches, feet, miles, leave it just as is, even after the entire country has embraced the metric system and miles have gone the way of leagues and rods. In general, please follow to the letter\u2014and to the last absent or present punctuation mark\u2014the Farrar, Straus & Giroux editions of my books. If you do, you will not dismantle various idiosyncrasies of style and punctuation that I chose to employ or create. If a comma is not there, please do not insert it. If commas are not there in adjectival strings, it was my intention that commas not be there. If you come upon an exxecutive, preserve him. He worked for Exxon. If, in \u201cIn Suspect Terrain,\u201d you come upon the words \u201cnew and far between,\u201d the words I intended were \u201cnew and far between.\u201d If William Penn\u2019s daughter wants a \u201crod and real,\u201d stet \u201creal.\u201d If someone is \u201ccalled to an office and chewed,\u201d do not add \u201cout.\u201d In that instance, I preferred to leave it out. If a rule is probed, as in \u201cthe exception that probes the rule,\u201d stet \u201cprobes.\u201d If something is described as \u201cavalanchine,\u201d I did not intend to say \u201cavalanching.\u201d If the text says \u201cporpentine,\u201d please do not change it to \u201cporcupine.\u201d Where \u201cThe Founding Fish\u201d refers to Reds Grange, Reds plural is what I meant. In \u201cLa Place de la Concorde Suisse,\u201d foreign words are not italicized\u2014and are not to be italicized. The same applies to \u201cTabula Rasa.\u201d In the title piece of \u201cGiving Good Weight,\u201d the rationale with respect to italics was more complex. Please carefully follow the original text in FSG editions. In \u201cAnnals of the Former World\u201d and its component books, if updating is done in the light of advances in scientific research please cover such matters in footnotes. Please also handle in footnotes and not in textual alterations anything to do with money, including but not limited to pounds, guineas, shillings, halfpennies, farthings, francs, pesetas, lire, dollars, Deutschmarks, yen, and euros. Titles are never to be altered. And please never title a collection of my work \u201cThe Best of . . . .\u201d Such titles are false in nature and demean work that is not included. In my various books, photographs, drawings, charts, maps, and the like have been used sparingly or not at all. That was intentional. I wanted the pictures to be done in words. I don\u2019t mean to lay down a rigid guideline here, but please consider respectfully the editions of my lifetime and use them generally as models. They are fairly but not wholly consistent. For example, more than two dozen maps were made specifically for \u201cAnnals of the Former World\u201d by Raven Maps & Images, of Medford, Oregon. In \u201cThe Ransom of Russian Art,\u201d the reproductions of dissidents\u2019 paintings are integral components of the book and their locations within it are not random. Notes underlying this literary will and other items that may have occurred to me after this date are in my computer in a Kedit file called Litwill.FSG. My books have been proofread with exceptional care by proofreaders at FSG, by proofreaders at The New Yorker magazine, by myself, and by others. In more than a million words, there are probably fewer than ten typographical errors. Please do not fix one unless textual evidence allows you to be absolutely positive that you have found one of those ten. I warmly thank you for your attention to these words.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
McPhee has included the following text in the publishing contract for each of his books since 1994. He says it applies to all his work. It is my wish that future editors respect my thoughts about various matters like inches versus centimetres and miles versus kilometres and the choice in which altitude is expressed and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[16],"class_list":["post-82","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-contracts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/waxwing.ltd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/waxwing.ltd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/waxwing.ltd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/waxwing.ltd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/waxwing.ltd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/waxwing.ltd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83,"href":"https:\/\/waxwing.ltd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions\/83"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/waxwing.ltd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/waxwing.ltd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/waxwing.ltd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}