The editing you did of Paul's manuscript [] has been very helpful and stimulating for me. I didn't realize how many little grammatical errors peppered the work, and for awhile I was a little perplexed as how exactly to deal with your suggestions. Since you've put so much excellent effort into helping me, I thought I'd try to put into words what my editorial policies are turning out to be. This way, in those instances where I fail to take your advice you'll at least know my reasoning, and if you spot a flaw in any of my policies you can help me correct it now before it does damage.

Here are my first principles:

1. Change as little as possible. On this we both agree. Neither you nor I are competent to complete anything Paul has written. In fact, I don't even feel a need to judge the merit of his unpublished writings aside from what may be inferred from my necessarily having to decide the order in which to publish them. If any part of a text must be changed it will be either:
   1. spelling and punctuation errors, giving as wide a latitude as possible for deviations of dialect, region and history. In general, I let stand Paul's conventions regarding:
      1. capitalized words.
      2. hyphenated words.
      3. 'all' as a singular pronoun. This will greatly aggrieve the purists, for which you may thank me at a later time.
   2. misuse of words. For instance, "bestride" vs. "astride".
   3. grammatical errors which destroy the sense for the naive reader, but not those which can be understood from the context without distracting from the argument. Many places where Paul omitted commas have been corrected; many have not.
   4. transcription errors, in which Paul accidentally:
      1. omitted a word necessary to complete a sentence.
      2. transposed adjacent letters of a word, or words of a phrase.
      3. simply misspoke in writing, as when he says Argo when he means Jason, or either/or when he means both/and.
2. Posthumous works have a right to be rough and incomplete drafts. Furthermore, they have a right to be more like transcriptions of verbal language than written language. If I can hear in my mind Paul saying a sentence in its entirety without his stopping to correct some part of it, then that sentence is correct for these purposes. His vocal idioms had their own logic, like poetry, and I'd rather he said things his own way. I do not attempted to improve on his style, even when, as in the case of over-long sentences, the opportunities to do so seem self-evident. (Incidentally, in a thousand years his works will only have to be translated into the extant language anyway.)
3. Use correct scholarly conventions only in editorial addenda and corrigenda. For instance, in formatting my reference notes I used the Chicago University Manual of Style, but I don't at all follow its advice in judging Paul's punctuation. I have also adopted all your corrections to my placing of note numbers in the text and the format of Paul's quotations from Homer.
4. The result should be all Paul, and no Dean. Or Len or the Board of Directors of the Ninth Street Center or the Chicago mob or anybody else. Many passages which are technically flawed are nevertheless the way Paul actually spoke. I simply can't bring myself to change them; nor will I litter his works with a lot of inconsequential editorial asides explaining changes we have or haven't made.
5. Make no apology for the current limitations of desk-top publishing technology. For instance, omit such punctuation niceties as the dieresis unless available on the printer used for publication.
6. [OBVIOUSLY] Keep the original manuscripts and typescripts, so that future scholars and computers can obsess to their hearts content on what matrices of meanings Paul must really have intended to want to try to begin (to begin to try to want to intend) to convey. As much as Paul and I hate scholars — He named his yapping dog The Professor — even we aren't cruel enough to deprive them of their perverse playgrounds. Little evils may keep such men from committing greater ones.

Any and all of these "principles" can change, so if you have ideas on the subject I'll be glad to hear them. Furthermore, I don't intend the above to be limitations on what kinds of suggestions you're to make. I consider our collaboration to be an assembly line: you do your thing, then I do mine. Our counterpoint will be titanic.