JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 2
Church's Mathematical Logic is offered here in a rarely seen format--namely, the one that was produced, printed and distributed by the members of the class. At the end of the description is an insightful story told by Albert Tucker about the mechanics of producing such a work.
Church, Alonzo: Mathematical Logic, Lectures
This is the Library of Congress' copy, with the original mimeographed LC callcard laid in. +++Lecture notes of Church's class taken by six of his graduate students (Ficken, Landau, Ruja, Singleton, Steenrod, Sweer, Weyl) in the fall term of 1935 at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.
The following is an interview between William Aspray and
Albert Tucker on the publication (so-called) of this work, taken from the
Tucker: "...Notes were taken, often by an assistant to the professor.
He was given the job of taking notes of the lectures, writing them up, and
having them edited by the professor. Then these would be mimeographed, and the
people in the course could for, say, a dollar or two subscribe to the notes,
which would be turned out in batches a week or two at a time. At the end, if
someone wanted to, the accumulated notes could be brought in, and we could send
them somewhere to have them bound. I think there was a charge of 25 cents for
binding. I have a whole drawer full of these notes. This is the way in which
they were bound, and these were lectures by
Aspray: So there are six or seven people ...
Tucker: Yes, and perhaps two would take notes at the same time and put their notes togethe., Then at another time there would be another pair, and the duty was shared, because Church didn't have an assistant to do this.
Aspray: I see.
Tucker: So it was either done by an assistant, or it was done by volunteers from the class. I happen to have been put in charge of the mimeographing machine by Dean Eisenhart when I began as an instructor in 1933. The mimeographing machine was down in the basement of Fine Hall. Up until that point it had been used without any supervision. The result of this was that various things had gone wrong with the machine, and it was decided that it had to be supervised. Somehow this supervision of the machine turned into it being my job to coordinate all this note business. For the running of the machine we used student labor. At that time there was a federal program to aid students under the Works Progress Administration, an F.D.R. program. So students could be paid for operating the mimeographing machine, a dollar and a half an hour or something like that. The other problem was collating. This was usually done in the common room around the large table that was in the center of the common room. That table was large enough, more than large enough, to serve as a ping-pong table. And I've known occasions when it was used as a ping-pong table. The piles of page 1, page 2, page 3 would be put around that table. Then we would collect all of the graduate students or others around at that particular time and have a "sorting bee". A person would simply take up a copy of page 1, move on take a copy of page 2, and so we would circulate around the table. Each time you went around the table you had a full copy. So the only cost for these notes was the paper and ink. We charged enough, a dollar a copy, sometimes fifty cents a copy if the set of notes was not very great, to cover these incidental expenses. But these notes began to be known around the world, and we would get orders for the notes. We would often have to take the stencils and rerun them two or three times, until the stencils were too worn to make additional copies. We sold the copies outside
Princeton for the cost in
Princeton plus postage. And because of this business, we actually developed an order form that people could use to order copies. Before we realized it we were getting into business. The first change that was made was to change from mimeographing to lithoprinting. This was done along about 1937 or '38. There was an outfit at that time in
Ann Arbor, Michigan by the name of Edwards Brothers that did lithoprinting of course-notes and that sort of thing for the whole country. They had a very efficient operation going there. So we had the course notes lithoprinted instead of mimeographed. We had to charge more for them, but we didn't have all the nuisance of doing it ourselves. Also there was the problem of storage, so we got the Princeton University Press to agree to store them for us. We gradually got them into the business of filling orders from the outside for a 25% commission. But it still seemed too haphazard, so in 1940 a new publication was started called Annals of Mathematics Studies. Here is one of these early Studies. This is Study Number Six, "The Calculi of Lambda Conversion", by
Church, 76 pages, $1.25. Done from pretty straight typing, nothing fancy, and we shipped off a typed master copy to Edwards Brothers. In due time they shipped back the number of copies that we had ordered. The minimum order that we used in those days was 200 copies, but it very often rose above that. They were priced so that if we sold the 200 copies we broke even. .."