COSMIC HERETICS: Part 5 :

by Alfred de Grazia

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRY

Deg detested the new Bobst Library building at New York University from the moment he entered it on 16 December 1972 at 16: 00 hours for a reception to celebrate its opening. The old central library had been in the basements of the Main Building. It was rumored that one could draw a book from there, and he did so from time to time. But now they had obstructed the view of Washington Square from his apartment to put up a casbah-red structure that from the outside seemed transported from the Near East while inside there was a giant space towering to twelve tall stories up, a roofed atrium around which wound narrow bands of shelving areas, obviously inadequate save for a few years of collecting, and already requisitioned on its top floor for the administrative officers of the University. The sensation was vertiginous; the building floated with its books tucked around its waist; how could a scholar study with his ideas precarious on the edge of exposed space?

A dance band was playing and he promptly envisioned how the design would permit its use by a Las Vegas concessionaire to bail out the near bankrupt school: a pavilion for dancing on the marble main floor, baths and massage parlors below, a bar on the second floor, social rooms on the third, a bordello for men on the fourth, one for women on the fifth, one for homosexuals on the sixth, then levels of gambling and a sky restaurant. One of the most expensive pieces of land in Manhattan had been used to roof empty space. The spectacle was dazzling. He rarely used the library.

When he was there he would ask himself whether it was hyper-critical of him to have such feelings, part of his basic envy of a world that rushed along without his consent, getting things done nevertheless; or was he simply observant of facts and aesthetics that most people, those in power as well as their subjects, could not see or think of. This happened often, that he would no sooner denounce something, privately or aloud, than he would reprimand himself for thinking that he could see truth and value and contradictions thereof that groups of intelligent people working in financial, architectural, legislative, and other task forces could not see. He did not wish to believe only in himself; he would rather enjoy the warmth of consensus, the applause of the crowd, but it would rarely work out so. Everything he did, everything he got, it seemed to him, even under the conditions when he was boss, gave him not a whole loaf, nor even half a loaf, but a thin slice. (I am not speaking of material goods, but of the quality of the product.) The situation regarding money alone was bad enough; the incompetency of the rich society to obtain value with its money was much worse to suffer.

Throughout his career, Deg found that it was harder to get money, the better the cause. A wage for oneself was not difficult, a salary slightly more so, commercial money for an imaginative project easier the quicker the turnover and the realization of profit. The trouble with your ideas, Rodman Rockefeller said to him once while they were conspiring about the world, is that they do not involve things that people regularly consume in large quantities, like canned food and cement houses. Not that Rodman was spectacularly successful with his company. IBEC, which went progressively from more romantic to less romantic, from third world to first world projects. In those times, Deg wondered at how year after year Rod could go on administering -- ever so comfortably to be sure -- a business without breaking out more often into some of the more imaginative enterprises and social adventures that he obviously enjoyed visualizing. Deg blamed affable father Nelson for the suppression.

To continue on money: then longer-term money became harder, then money for a vulgar or fashionable charity, then money for important research or an extraordinary book. Money came hardest for a cause that one believed to be purely for the public good -- unless it was a commonly recognized public good like the Bobst Library or some other building for a respectable university to house respectable and vulgar objects, or unless it was a concealed fraction of a public good (the thin slice of the loaf again), like a significant sociological question slipped into an advertising survey for dog food, or unless it was illegally obtained, wherefore some political radicals have robbed banks and others their families, and still others lived under miserable and dangerous conditions.

Deg made a dozen attempts in search of a teaching and study platform for catastrophe and quantavolution. Recall this was a period when all kinds of new courses were being pressed upon universities and colleges; standards were in general decline. Professors were wringing their hands and burying their files for safekeeping. Yet they consistently rejected the advances (never mind seeking the help) of quantavolutionists who had more respect for the traditional research materials of the culture -- in classics, linguistics, foreign languages, history of science, philosophy, etc. and whose attractiveness to students would have erected massive barriers against the anti-intellectual and book-condemning feelings rampant in student bodies everywhere.

A score of teaching heretics had managed to insert V.'s materials into their courses under various pretexts and in several cases could even carry his name in the title or subtitle of a course. The Dartmouth Experimental College at Hanover, N. H., invited V. one time for two days of meetings with a seminar; at least six faculty members of as many different disciplines met with the seminar before and after to discuss his books Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval.

V. was generally unhappy about the educational system, although he was displeased, too, with the student rebellions when they occurred. A dramatic polemic against the system of higher education finally appeared posthumously in three pages of Mankind in Amnesia (182-5). At least this statement is available to save him from reproach for never having attacked on general grounds (as opposed to personalized ground) the foundations of authority or their institutions.

Before converting his own social invention course to a course on quantavolution, a one-time unauthorized change to which no official objection was made, Deg tried a frontal appeal. Here, in 1973, he addresses an assistant dean for curriculum, after discussing the matter with Bayly Winder, Dean and friend. He is making as few waves as possible, by placing the course in the summer session (where "imaginative offerings" are encouraged). The proposal went to the Committee of Deans:

Nothing could be worked out in the unprestigious "School for Continuing Education." My academic readers can practice a dry run on this proposal, or another like it as carried in The Burning of Troy: their own committees might well respond similarly. Practically all universities in America capture their students with "credit courses" and find "course anomalies" as distasteful as anomalies in science.

The New School for Social Research was not so impeded, although it, too, became divided into "non-credit" and "credit" areas. V. gave a successful series of lectures there in 1964. Clark Whelton also taught there a non-credit course on "the Velikovsky Question" in the Fall of 1979 and significantly some students kept in touch with him afterwards, interested in keeping informed and hoping to form an association.

Milton to de Grazia February 15, 1980:

Milton was a popular professor at Lethbridge University and was teaching and reading quantavolution in his general physics and astronomy classes. He was an intellectual force on the vast Canadian Prairie, in touch with the press and radio systems. He knew the vast skies there like a Polynesian navigator. His lifelong asthma kept him in a lifelong course in advanced nutrition, organic chemistry, and atmospheric science. Then he read into myth and legend, and there was no stopping him. In every picture he discovered fresh signs. Aside from his personal qualities, he could connect with the more than ordinary number of students there who had heard everything good about God and the Bible at home, but nothing at all, if not bad, about these subjects in "education." Even only to hear the Bible being used as a learning tool was exciting to them. One should recall, too, how low the estate of physics had fallen.

We find our Dean of science reporters, Walter Sullivan of the New York Times, admonishing us.

Sullivan's key lines were the juxtaposition of two anomalies -- public paranoia and physicists' schizoid remoteness of character, traits that do not marry well. The American Physical Society was discussing the low state of physics, and Sullivan wrote that generally the leaders thought that more money should be spent by the government. The British physicist and astronomer, Fred Hoyle, wanted even greater accelerators. He also wanted scientists to participate in politics. "You see why the world of politics is such an indescribable mess. Think of the opening of the baseball season. Think of the ceremonial first pitch. Think of what the baseball season would be like if that sort of pitching went on right through the summer. Then you have it -- the present state of affairs." Presumably under Hoyle's new-age baseball, physicists would pitch and baseball would become nothing but home-runs as the batters perfect themselves to bang away at the invariable straight-ball coming right down the center. Or perhaps Hoyle was saying that physicists should join the pluralist republic, as the ethnic strain of physics, helping where they could. Deg was not sure this was "according to Hoyle," but he liked the idea.

Milton tied together the Eastern and Western Canadians, and the Canadian belt triangulated to the Princeton-Trenton-Philadelphia area where Sizemore, Deg, and Greenberg kept shop. In the Kronos network, besides Greenberg, Sizemore and Ellenberg, might be found Rose, Vaughan, Wolfe, Cardona, and Jueneman. Some say that there should be added Milton, Sherrard, Westcott, Hewsen, Ransom, Talbott and Sammer. It was a unifocal net, with Greenberg as the focus. Deg connected with London, Holland, Paris, Basel. Greenberg, losing Peter James in London, found Bernard Newgrosh as correspondent. Marvin Luckerman, a doctoral student at the University of California at Los Angeles, founded a biennial magazine, Catastrophism and Ancient History; relations with Greenberg were cool, and the British were not much impressed with his first issues, but praised the good try. Still he rounded up a thousand readers and began to improve his journal. The creationist groups stemming out of Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, and Seattle were quantavolutionary perforce, having been given only a few thousand years by the Bible to produce everything. Here and there were quantavolutionaries of orthodox connections -- Gould at Harvard in paleontology, Ager of geology in England, and so on for several countries. The password that could readily cut these out from others was their answer to the question, "Has a planet moved?"

A very small group it all was, absurdly so when compared with the network of thousands of periodicals, scores of associations, and the mass media that served orthodox science. It makes one wonder whether the heretics were worth considering: certainly by the usual American standards of great-sized multiplex technology they were not.

Deg heard when young from his democratic teachers how smartly the vested interests turned to minister to public needs, and was continually surprised when old to see how reluctant they had become to give themselves away. As his friend Lasswell put it, when writing with Abe Kaplan Power and Society, no ruling class gives up its goods without being forced to do so. This goes pari passu for philanthropoids and publishers, two industries affected with a public interest. The philosopher, artist, composer, author, administrative innovator, and physical inventor, if he is to be creative, typically is driven to become a sneakthief, or revolutionary, or go mad, or all three. So says Deg, who worried only about becoming a revolutionary, because then he would have to spend his time among sneakthiefs and maddies as well.

"Of course the heretics would not get support, they did not apply for it. One must play the game by the rules. Apply and apply and apply again." Deg knew more about this than his heretical acquaintances by the time they had encountered one another. He had enjoyed the fleshpots and studied what motivated the foundations, publishers and universities. He could warn the heretics that they need hardly try -- and V. was of this opinion, too -- or, worse, in order to succeed, they must prepare themselves to spend much of their energies in trying, and he was insistent upon a point that few could appreciate, that only a peculiar type of masochistic personality could apply incessantly to the point of success without losing the vigor, freshness, profundity of his ideas and the vital energy needed to pursue them for their own sakes.

On a few occasions, the heretics would solicit funds from individuals in small amounts to disseminate a publication about Velikovsky, but efforts at larger funding failed. The Foundation for Studies of Modern Science initiated a series a approaches, of which I have already spoken; still, I shall add one more instance.

Murray Rossant, Director of the Twentieth Century Fund, was reported by someone to be attracted to V.'s work. Because Deg and his brother, Sebastian, were already known and had been working with the Fund in very different fields, FOSMOS sent two fresh and handsome faces to meet with Rossant and his colleague Schwartz, Bruce Mainwaring and Coleman Morton, both enlightened businessmen. A friendly encounter ensued, the upshot of which was that, although the Fund had never gone into this area, the two officers were interested personally in seeking other sources of funding, and when all was said and done, nothing happened. Nothing, that is, except that the Fund itself gave money to Giorgio di Santillana and Hertha von Dechend for research that they were doing on ancient and primitive myth and legend which, it was believed beforehand, would show that mankind was clever and scientific long before it was credited with being so, but also that there was no need to invoke catastrophism to explain the nature of mankind's early preoccupations.

This was recounted to Deg and the others by Stechini, who was well acquainted with Santillana and von Dechend. The product of the research, Hamlet's Mill, was welcomed by the heretics, nevertheless, for its intimations of ancient quantavolutions, but, if the reader wishes to understand the rampant confusion of the book, he may simply apply the hypothesis: here are two great scatomatized experts trying to avoid mention of catastrophism.

Though they be liberal or conservative, foundations are unlikely to be creative. They think they are able to judge creativity, of course, and especially if large, "creativity" and the "independent sector" of society are often included in their slogans. Their size and their bureaucracy correlate well.

The cosmic heretics might discern that they were outlaws without going to the trouble of applying for their identity cards. But they could not help themselves: after all, they were educated in a way, bathed regularly, were fluent in the language, and found their interests carried in the index of foundation provenances. So they were tempted from time to time to try for a grant or subsidy. To my knowledge, they invariably failed. (I am not speaking of the occasional hand-outs tendered by friends and other heretics but of the system of lending a hand as institutionalized by the private or government foundations.)

Deg had enjoyed many experiences with foundations, small and large. The large were too "responsible" and proper to be bold. The small were generally pets and hobby horses of their founders.

Exceptions occurred that were interested in large social issues. A small foundation, the Relm-Earthart group, was a pleasure to deal with. It had a tough board, and was administered by James Kennedy and Richard Ware, both of whom bet on the man, not the institution, and did not try to make useless work for themselves and others. (The Cornuelle brothers, Herb and Dick, were this way, too, when they were in the foundation business. So was Bill Baroody.) Deg did a variety of economic and political studies with their help over the years. They were not occupied with ancient history or natural history. Since they lent you aid, they must be "good," I say to Deg sarcastically. Very well, he says, shall I give you some bad ones that have helped me? Never mind, I said, I'm in enough trouble with you already. Yet the very deprivations and constraints that help Deg in his quantavolutionary trap made him more determined and passionate. Again Deg is writing in his notebook, perhaps to warn himself, like a politician warns himself to refuse favors or an infantryman warns himself to keep his feet clean:

Deg never committed such follies -- almost never -- and blamed his frustration correctly or incorrectly upon his own character: he inspired himself but could rarely inspire enough of the all-important others. Society is run by networks and gangs, and you have to join a gang, stick with it, use it and let it use you, and if ultimately you fail or perish with the gang, well, that's the end of the trail, it's a life-term establishment. Most gangs and network fails. Therefore skill and luck in getting into and out of the appropriate gangs is often essential to success.

"We're working on an ABS issue about what needs to be done with the science of economics," said Deg to his colleague, Professor Arnold Zurcher, who was also Director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Foundation operated in this area and Deg wondered whether they would provided support for the project in the neighborhood of $10,000. His colleague represented an approach to political science that Deg regarded as outmoded and intent upon replacing. He was a jolly fellow and they were friends, and he knew that Deg was carrying the weak finances of the American Behavioral Scientist on his back. Do up the proposal, he said, I think that you have a good chance and I'll support it. Not long afterwards, Deg received an official letter from the Foundation rejecting the proposal. He was surprised -- the request was logical: it was for small money and enjoyed support. His colleague was apologetic. Al, he reported, the proposal passed from one vice-president to another, with Margolis' article from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists about the Velikovsky affair attached, and a big "No" scribbled on the face of your proposal. (Later on Bill Baroody of the American Enterprise Institute came up with some money to support the issue, and economists were assembled and the issue published.)

Warren Weaver was a career philanthropist, wrote a good general survey on probability and, like many another, was a nice man. New York University named its Computer Center after him. (For a photo of it, in context, see Deg's Politics for Better or for Worse.)

To all medical psychologists: what is the vagus nerve syndrome that make a man "draw a long, deep breath"? Re Harrison Brown and the "woman astronomer" with a hyphenated name from Harvard, see The Velikovsky Affair, Alfred de Grazia, Editor.

6 May 1964

Dear Mr. Farinholt,

Thank you for your kind letter and its enclosure. I can have no opinion about the validity of Velikovsky's work; his ideas may be wholly misguided, but I know that he is not dishonest. What bothered me was the violence of the attack upon him: if his theories were absurd, would they not have been exposed as such in time without a campaign of vilification? One after another of the reviews misquoted him and then attacked the misquotation. So in the Margolis piece you send me I read "Pi-ha Hiroth which Velikovsky has altered into Pi-ha Khiroth, further enhancing his evidence." But the two are equally acceptable transliterations of the Hebrew, and the latter is the more scientific. For the Egyptian name, Margolis, following old books, writes, Pekharti, but the Egyptian has no vowels, so that the correct from is P-kh-r-t, and of this Ph-khirot is very plausible expansion. The ha in the Hebrew is merely the definite article. It is his critic, not Velikovsky, who is uniformed and rash -- and so elsewhere also. The issue is one of ordinary fair play.

Yours sincerely,
Moses Hadas

May 31,1966

Dear Mr. Weaver:

I have harbored for many months your critical note concerning the studies of the American Behavioral Scientist on the reactions of scientists to Immanuel Velikovsky, thinking all the while of an appropriate constructive response.

We have recently published an enlarged version of the same studies in book form and I have asked the publishers to send you a copy with my compliments.

There are, of course, two issues in the Velikovsky affair -- one, the conduct of scientist and the press; two, validity and utility of his theories. The issues are separable but an involvement in one naturally inclines one into a stance on the other. I think that you can help many people, including myself, find their way through these issues, granted that you may have neither the time nor the inclination to take on major responsibilities for the problems raised.

What I should like to suggest is that we get together for a day's conversation on the two issues in the company of several other men, with the sole end of educating each other. I have in mind persons such as Professor Donald Fleming of the Department of History and Science at Harvard University, Thomas Kuhn, Professor of History and Science at Princeton University, and Professor Harold D. Lasswell at the School of Law at Yale University. I believe that five would be the right number.

I have mentioned a reunion to none of the men named, and have an idea only of Lasswell's thinking about the subject at hand.

We might spend the morning on the question of validity (not "solving" it, but working to understand it) and the afternoon on the question of treatment of unorthodox ideas in science.

I am quite at your disposition on the matter. Hoping to receive your opinion, I remain

Sincerely yours,
Alfred de Grazia Editor

There was no reply.

In reflecting upon all that happened to V. and to Deg and the others, it would be unfortunate to keep one's eyes on the immediate characters alone. For they are all symbols, too, players in a drama, representing types of our civilization. If V. is subject of a hundred book reviews, these reviews are signs of the times that happened to gather electrostatically like fluff around his work.

J. B. S. Haldane, a noted biologist who also wrote on Science and Ethics, found V.'s Worlds in Collision a degradation of both science and religion, a peculiarly enraging combination, apparently, for a marxist and fellow-traveler, whom Deg, with a long nose for hidden political mazes, suspected might be waving the flag (red, that is) for his American colleague, Harlow Shapley; and when Deg, duty-bound to probe wherever necessary, intimated these sensings of political psychology, he was scolded by certain naive and intensely tender liberal consciences, as if political processes of leftist politics, external politics, could never enter scientific processes. So he was amused when, in perusing an edition of Frederick Engels' Dialectics of Nature, a work which many Soviet scientists find it de rigueur to praise highly somewhere in their books and which contributes to biological science roughly in the same measure as Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, he had to note that the adulatory introduction to Engels' book was by none other than J. B. S. Haldane, who apparently could see contemporary marvels in the century-old work of a communist that he could not perceive in V.'s book. Furthermore, had not Marx and marxists been universally insistent upon the interconnection of all things with the ownership of the means of production and therefore all things were politicized and relevant subjects for investigation.

Indeed, Deg, in his typically optimistic manner (he would pick up a redhot stove), had conceived of the true interests of marxist theory as residing in catastrophism, not uniformitarianism. Why he asked himself, sometime around 1978, did Marx and Engels so strongly endorse Darwin, fashioning the pattern for marxists to follow ever since (the heresy of Lysenko in the 1950's being a significant incident thereto)? Perhaps, he thought, the model of catastrophism did not give them a broad natural inclined plane for the progression of history; it defeats man's greatest works in an instant. It pays hob with the development of the pure but reversed Hegelian dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis in the historical process. It depresses man's will and capacity to build an ultimate utopia. And Marx and Engels, despite their rejection of the Hegelian "will" and ideal, conceived of and nurtured the most fantastically strong human will, one that could overturn social orders and political regimes (of course, with the aid of history). So they needed natural change to back up social change -- Engels waxing polemical on this need -- but the change must not overturn catastrophically the works of revolutionary men.

Still, Deg thought also that the problem of arousing the masses was immediate and paramount with them, whereas, the problem of nature and history (just mentioned) was less important. Now the masses must see themselves as the symbol or substance for a great tidal wave, storm, explosion, and destroyer. Therefore, the imagery of catastrophe would be more effective than the interminable gradual incremental change of Darwin and bourgeois society. And indeed there are indications the Marx smelled an ideological rat in the theory of evolution. Furthermore, in reading Soviet studies pertinent to quantavolution, Deg could sense a slackness in their basic tie to Lyellism and Darwinism. In the back of Deg's mind there was an ulterior motive, to loosen the anchor of uniformitarianism (or "actualism" as the Europeans call it) in the marxist setting, thus to free up a flow of new quantavolutionary energy.

So Deg wanted to address himself to this problem, and he asked his daughter, Victoria, who was a professor by now, eminent on intellectual movements of the past century, and who said, yes, it did seem like a good idea, and she being much better attuned to the marxist mentality and avant-garde currents in the field than he, Deg promptly submitted a proposal to the political science and sociology section of the Natural Science Foundation. When the refusal came, he asked for and received the critiques of the review panel. He was a little dismayed to discover that he was illiterate and ignorant beyond his worst fears, even more so than most scholars must be on the measuring scale that the Foundation had provided conveniently to its panel.

But when he thought that he might judge the responses to his proposal better if he knew who were writing them, the request was refused, on grounds of "policy," and, of course, the policy was, as is usual, good for those who were in charge of the policy and working behind the defenses afforded by the policy. Momentarily Deg thought to investigate the law on the subject, and to have introduced a bill for laying open such matters, as an amendment to the federal law on freedom of information, or even to launch a lawsuit, seeking a mandamus to produce the records. He didn't do so, of course, because, as my readers by now amply appreciate, ars lunga, vita breve, Two years later, a postscript to the episode occurs in his journal:

But enough of foundations, lest I have no energy left for treating of publishers. The lesson that publishers learned from the Velikovsky Affair was the same as a first-term convict learns in jail, how not to get caught a second time. The unfortunate victim of the lesson was any author who was preparing a book in the field. Macmillan Company dumped Velikovsky's book and Doubleday Publishers made a good deal of it over the years. All the nice people and the pundits and the heretics believed that Macmillan, Doubleday, and other publishers would have "learned their lesson" and a new age in publishing would dawn. Controversial books would not be discriminated against, and so on. To Deg (I hope that I am not giving him too much credit for saying so), this was utopian thinking, and he ought to know, being a utopian, a "realistic utopian," he insisted, by which he meant precisely a person playing a high risk game knowingly, because the game involved some worthy ideal. He said this to those who called his works on world order, "Kalos" and "Kalotics," utopian.

Publishers, on the contrary, did not venture into catastrophism, nor make any money out of the "pseudo-science" or "fringe science" of catastrophes. Ransom's Age of Velikovsky was privately published, and when later published commercially, sold only modestly. Patten's works were published privately and did well. Deg's Velikovsky Affair was handled by two small, high-risk publishers and sold under 5,000 copies, and later in England sold another 10,000 copies. David Talbott's Saturn did not repay Doubleday its large author's advance. Melvin Cook's book, Prehistory and Earth Models, published in England, sold very quietly and modestly; it was technically written, but an "acceptance" would have sold many copies in college courses, technological industry, and the Scientific American's public. Hapgood's book on The Path of the Pole sold modestly. Milton's Recollections of a Fallen Sky failed to reach the American market from Canada.

Henry Bauer's book on the Velikovsky Affair took six years to be published and a University Press did the job (Illinois); since Bauer found little of substantive value in V.'s work, one need not wonder how a pro-V. work would have fared in the same circles. Dorothy Vitaliano's anti-catastrophic book on disasters in geology (Indiana University Press) enjoyed only a small sale. So it is not being pro - or anti-catastrophism that sells, but books on the subject are either unsellable or the publishers will not bring them out or promote them properly.

The most successful publisher attending to quantavolution was William Corliss' Sourcebook Project, a household concern, that culled the history of science and current reviews for worthy material, finding thousands, reprinting hundreds, all the while maintaining a nicely neutral position.

What was true for book-publishers held also for magazine publishers. The only magazine with a general readership that gave sympathetic attention to quantavolution was Frontiers of Science, edited by Elizabeth Philips. It failed after several years because it was part of a conglomerate operation that used the bottom line to weed our unprofitable properties. The very small journals, playing to between 300 and 1500 subscribers were fully unprofitable. Yet without them, there would have been no means of advancing a viewpoint attractive to millions. By the rationale of laissez-faire economists this should not have occurred; in fact it is normal in the world of education and science. The contradiction between a society's need for creativity and the resources allocated to creativity is stark. It is further exaggerated in the inner organization of education and science where the more creative the work the less the outlets for it. New journals in the sciences often form out of failures of the reception system. Theoretical Physics was founded because some scholars could not get enough of their material into Physical Review. Deg founded P. R. O. D (Political Research: Organization and Design), to advance new ideas in political science and sociology; it later became the American Behavioral Scientist, which was markedly altered in format, approach, and contents when he gave up its editorship in 1965. One of Deg's students, Howard Smuckler, became editor of magazines of Ancient Astronauts and ESP; from the beginning they were given newsstand circulations of 200,000 copies, with the proviso that wild nonsense be given free rein. The most fortunately situated scholar in the country for communicating occasionally his ideas of quantavolution, sometimes subtly, at times explicitly, was paleontology Professor Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University who wrote a regular feature for the magazine Natural History, published by the New York Museum of Natural History with a popular circulation reaching a million readers. Various publicists such as Sprague de Camp and Theodore Gordon gave chapters over to mocking or explaining Velikovsky, but their books were not greatly affected by these chapters. One of the best of the publicists was Fred Warshawsky who wrote Doomsday: The Science of Catastrophe. Picking up Rene Thom's mathematical topological theory of catastrophism, presumably applicable in any field, he applied it nonmathematically, heuristically, in discussing the many works trending toward the quantavolutionary outlook. He undertook with V. a couple of long sessions that curled his hair and set him straight on what to say of V.'s achievements in an article for the Reader's Digest. Having escaped perdition, he went on to write a full book on catastrophes, ancient and modern, which was published by the Reader's Digest Press. This company made a distribution agreement with Harper and Row, which performed so poorly with his book that Warshawsky complained bitterly to everyone and achieved some promotional effort. The company then closed down, and Harper and Row stopped selling the book, returning its very large remaining stock. Then McGraw Hill bought rights to the book for its back list, to no effect. Over 8,000 copies were sold, but 17,000 copies were "remaindered" at a pittance. The New York Times ignored the book. Some favorable reviewing occurred. It went out of print after only several years. And please to note the way in which an author's "property" is kicked around.

The situation, as I surveyed it, is that not one major publisher has in print a book on quantavolution, excepting Doubleday, Morrow, and Dell, all with Velikovsky, and excepting, too, the New American Library with a reprint of Francis Hitching's The Neck of the Giraffe, in which the head of the giraffe is quantavolution, the neck is the long disdainful connecting link, and the body is conventional biology. (For those who might think otherwise, I should say that Erich von Daniken is an "ancient astronauts" buff, not a catastrophist, except in mood. I say this because I am often asked what I think of von Daniken and I respond that he is not a quantavolutionary; he blithely propounds mysteries without worthwhile solutions, but he is, alas, a cosmic heretic.

On October 31, 1982 (Halloween ) the 15 Paperback Bestsellers (trade) which were listed in the New York Times around the U. S. A. carried six (6) titles dealing with the cat, Garfield. The number one bestseller was "Garfield Takes the Cake," then, number 4 was "Here Comes Garfield," number 10 "Garfield Weighs In," number 13 "Garfield at Large," number 14 "Garfield Bigger than Life," and number 15 "Garfield Gains Weight." If Garfield were missing, Rubik's Cube would occupy several of its places, vying with books on diet. The NYT defines this class of paper backs as "softcover books usually sold in bookstores and priced at average higher than mass market."

One cannot read Deg's notes and hear him talk without deriving an apocalyptic view of the publishing industry. "It is a doubly sick industry. It is economically sick and it is functionally sick. By 'functionally' I mean physically, ideologically, and morally. It is dominated by cheap nonpublishing money, coming from extravagant swashbucklers and conglomerates of merged and paralyzed units. Ownership is alienated from editors, editors from producers, editors from authors. It is characterized by some of the worst labor practices, witness to the shadiest deals, and engages in the thoroughgoing degradation or writers."

This is the way he often spoke. He wouldn't say much and sometimes in a group or committee be quiet, abstracted, even appearing bored. Then suddenly he would be seized, and as if to make up for lost time and to persuade others that he was only speaking because what he was saying was being torn from his lips, he would hammer out the words, scalding rather than sweetening the atmosphere, so that when he finished, there was neither applause nor babble of dissent, but a pause, until someone evasively spoke around him, and when that happened he didn't insist upon his point but subsided for a good while.

Deg could recite a long list of great writers who had put out their own books, he even claimed that most great writers did so. First of all, up until the late Eighteenth Century -- Franklin, Voltaire, the Encyclopedists -- every writer put out his own books, unless, after burying him, friends or relatives printed his work. In a marginal note to one of his late anatomical sketches, Leonardo de Vinci implored his "neighbors" to see to it that his works would be printed.

The publishing racket (Deg's word, not mine) developed sweetly out of bookstores and printing shops where it belonged and should have stayed, but by the latter part of the nineteenth century Balzac was excoriating the thieves and profiteers of the business in an excellent novel, Illusions Perdues. Dickens, Dostoevski and Flaubert sweated to carry their novels first as serials in magazines. But where are the magazines, bad as they were, today -- they carry a single chapter, but usually the pain of editing a chapter for a magazine is damaging to both the author and his book.

Deg had one arrow in his quiver to fire at the now pathetically wounded publishers. They are frauds, announced he.

At this point I intended to escape Deg's diatribes by telling how he came to enter upon his writing campaign and then to publish his own works. Lest you think that such violent opinions as his come out of intense suffering and exploitation, let me once again remind you of Deg's character, acquired in earliest childhood: he could be and was often indignant about a person or an institution or a system, without being hurt by them and even while being helped. In a way, he was rather like his children's generation and the hippies, except that he had the forcefulness and discipline that produce alternatives; he seemed always to have ready a proposal for another way of doing things. In this way, he was more sprung from the nineteenth century utopians: Fourier, Brook Farm, St. Simon, Marx, Henry George, As you will see here, he didn't expect much, he didn't suffer greatly, he didn't mind sacrificing, and he did not dance a jig when he finished the job. I assure you once more of that great difference between Deg and V. Deg did not see himself as a victim; V. saw himself as a victim.

Deg moved into the field of quantavolution slowly and then ever faster. This I would attribute to his heavy involvement's between 1962 and 1966 with the American Behavioral Scientist and the design and production of retrieval of bibliographic annotations in the behavioral sciences. During the same time, he was writing heavily in political science, especially on the reform of relations between Congress and the Presidency. After he turned from these in the period 1967 to 1972, he wrote Kalos : What is to be Done with Our World? Hired by Simulmatics Corporation, and given the assimilated rank of a general with "Top Secret" access by the Department of Defense, he spent a few weeks in and out to win over the Vietnamese people and to bolster the morale of their own troops.) The job led him quickly into urging measures that were too radical and diversionary for the forces, civilian and military, that were moving in an irresistible death-dance toward the ignominious withdrawal of the United States presence in Indochina.

He was writing poetry and before flying to Vietnam in 1967 he collected his poems and put them to press as the Passage of the Year; some of them he framed in what he called an "eccentric," "super-sprung" rhythm. He gave a copy of the book to Harold Lasswell who said, yes, he had written poetry when young, at which Deg commented that poetry was more accessible to the senile than the juvenile. He gave a copy to Velikovsky who, it appeared, had published a small book of poems under the pseudonym of Immanuel Ram, in Russian, in 1934. V. read Deg's poems and used a quotation from them on one occasion to persuade Deg of a point. Suddenly it seemed that mankind was a secret crowd of poets.

He then joined with a University instructor who had not studied directly with him, and had met in the annual Department reception, Nina Mavridis, a tough, emotional, polyglot petite blonde smartly turned out, whom he later married. They went in search of a Greek island house, and he bought a parcel of land on Naxos, which was then a quiet backward island, and there built the stone cottage facing across the straits to Paros.

He turned to several of his former students, graduates, and "drop-outs" from the system, and together they organized an experimental college, L'Universite du Nouveau-Monde, and settled in for a hectic year upon the Alps of Valais, Switzerland. All the while, he visited Princeton, coming and going, keeping in touch with the Velikovsky circle there and with whoever of his immediate family happened to be home from schools and wanderings around the world.

With the University of Switzerland closed down, the United States withdrawing from Indochina, his work on a new world order totally ignored, his family disassembled, efforts at reforms within New York University ending only in cosmetic changes, and resettled efficiently with Nina in an apartment of Washington Square Village, just across from one of his classrooms, and a block from his office, Deg drove through the resulting energy gap into the field of quantavolution. He completed two books of political science during this period, neither requiring heavy research but both of which, Politics for Better or Worse and the "lectures to the Chinese", Eight Bads, Eight Goods, he considered as "state of the art" philosophically, and innovative in format and perspective. Both were "successes," he thought: neither earned much money $18,000 in the first case, $3,500 in the second. His University teaching had never in his career cut very deeply into his time for study and writing, partly because he did not "pal around" with students and varnish their wasting time. Too, he avoided committee assignments that seemed useless, and had little need for generalized social encounter. During nine months of the year, he gave an average of twenty hours per week to straight pedagogical, work; the rest went into his projects -- editorial, political, pedagogical, consultative -- and writing. Wherever he had taught, including New York University, he was expected to be a "producer," to do research and writing in return usually for a lighter teaching and committee load. He was usually expected "to bring money into the University," which sometimes he did, and to find funds for his research and activities, which sometimes he did. He used his time fully and completely for these latter purposes, working year-round, seven days a week, for three to twelve hours. (obviously, everything did not "come easy to him," as so many acquaintances believed.) His journal slackened off, through the sixties and seventies, entries occurring only every several days on the average and even then deprived of events recited in their fullness.

He rarely spent more than ten minutes on the day's newspapers; he watched television several hours a week; he listened little to music and rarely played his trumpet any more, but often was humming and whistling to himself. Except when reading a novel or a poem, he did not read in the conventional way. Reading was an instrument of research and writing. He would pounce upon a book or article and seek directly the point that he was addressing, which had made him pick up the work in the first place. If it wasn't helpful, he would put the work aside. He could rarely be trapped, for instance, by some lurid description of a disaster. At the rate of 100 pages an hour he could tell whether there was anything useful to him in a succession of books or articles. An issue of Science, though it might contain 100 pages, would ordinarily occupy 10 minutes, just enough time to see whether there was something of interest in it. He would however, spend hours on a relevant two-page article in a strange field -- a paleontological article using explicit chronometry, for instance, learning the method used, looking for the expected illogical turn or twist, the weak point in a piece which after all had been fashioned with extreme care, was the darling of the authors' eyes, and had been rigorously criticized by conventional readers.

At first both current materials and ancient materials on quantavolution were not so easy to find. Stecchini was alone as supplier of references outside of V.'s works. As the network of scholars like Mullen, Juergens, Milton, Crew, Sizemore, Moore, Lowery, James and several dozen others came into the field the supply of references grew exponentially. Pensée, Kronos, The S. I. S. Review and Workshop and Corliss' Sourcebooks and Newsletter brought hundreds of citations to light. I cannot do less than say that the names of the hundred authors of the articles and notes in these magazines is the measure of 90% of the field. If screened for relevance and translated into quantavolutionary terms, several hundred more names would be added -- not that they would gladly accept being added -- from the conventional output of scientific books and journals.

In a combination of disgust, impractical judgment, and worthy motive, he decided in 1977 to resign all obligations to teach and supervise dissertations and to be at hand for the various faculty meetings; he found the University ready to pay him a third of his salary to engage solely in research until he would arrive at the age of 63, after which he would be considered as fully retired. The agreement was soon followed by a considerable general inflation of the economy, and a reduction in foundation activities, so that he was constrained to stringent personal economy, not so evident on the surface, but oppressive in reality. He had no illusions about the interests of foundations and government research agencies in quantavolution and in fact received no help. He earned a little money here and there, whatever could be done rapidly without taking his money here and there, whatever could be done rapidly without taking his mind off of his quantavolutionary studies. He sold a piece of land on Naxos. He sold, too, a small house he had bought for his retirement, near Brown University where he had once taught and close friends still lived. These funds and more went into research costs -- typing, Xeroxing, travel -- and to the occasional support of his mother and other family members. Nina, although she finally earned her doctorate, and was a most effective teacher, could not get into and hold onto a position in one of the college systems of the New York area. Whatever money she had, she spent fully and equitably. This is no place to speak of her at length; she was everywhere in those years, but when Deg comes to tell of Naxos, it will be up to him to tell of Nina. By the middle seventies, she and Deg had split, and came finally to see one another as friends only, there on the island where she bought and remodeled two medieval Venetian homes and lived with her husband Peter whenever possible.

Deg's first book in the Quantavolution Series, The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars was written in the early seventies. He had thought for several years that he should write a textbook on what he was then calling revolutionary primevalogy, but before he had settled among several outlines of the work and written a few passages, he reached back for a journal entry written while staying at Pythagoreion on the Island of Samos and decided to try out the new field with a case study.

The story referred to is a brief lyric of a hundred lines, sung in Book VIII of the Odyssey, the epic poem of Homer. It tells of a much longer opera ballet sung and danced for Ulysses.

Deg showed his manuscript to Juergens who was surprised at its coincidence with his own electrical theory of the events, which was to appear ultimately as two articles in the magazine Pensée. V. would not read it. Deg wished to dedicate it to him. V. said let Bill Mullen read it and if he likes it, go ahead. Mullen did, very much. Cyrus Gordon liked it, but could not respond to the astrophysical scenario. Further he suspected Aphrodite to be Venus, not Moon. The English acquaintances of Deg got onto the manuscript when he submitted it to the publisher, Sidgwick and Jackson, who had published The Velikovsky Affair in England, and he showed it to them. They liked it, but in all conscience could not accept the identification of Aphrodite with the Moon, for they identified her instead with Athene, Ishtar, and the morning and evening star, Venus.

This disagreement meant that the English group was ready to dispute an important point of Velikovsky for, in his application of the Iliad to the Martian disturbances of the seventh century, he had found Aphrodite joining with Ares in the Trojan War to fight against Athene. Whereupon, and for other reasons, Aphrodite was assigned to the Moon. Desertions were numerous on this score. When James published a critique of Deg's identification of the goddess, it stood without rebuttal, and Cardona, Rix and others were convinced of James's case.

American publishers were not turned on by the Love Affair. W. W. Norton, through Brockway, said it was well written but not to their tastes. So it went with one publisher after another, Simon and Schuster, Dodd and Mead, Doubleday, Random House, Harcourt Brace, Stein and Day, Princeton University Press, Harper and Row, Atheneum, Sidgwick and Jackson, Free Press, and even the New York University Press (unless a subsidy were paid). Deg thought he should "toot his horn" perhaps, as his mother used to tell her boys, so he prepared a blurb about it.

He made the Love Affair sound as if it might attract the masses, but publishers were quick to point out that the book was serious, learned, of dubious validity, and sophisticated: in a word, forget the masses; indeed, betake yourself to a university press. But Deg knew already the university presses were eager for wide publics, undercapitalized, dominated by editorial committees of the more conventional members of their faculties, and slow and painstaking to a fault. He visited Jerry Sherwood of the Princeton University Press. She returned the manuscript in time with the expected advice. Deg stopped peddling the book. He was too busy with the general work, Chaos and Creation, to carry on the sometimes interminable pingpong of serious publishing.

Time after time over the next decade, he would pause in his work to recalculate the options of his predicament. Naive friends counseled him: "Any press would be happy to consider your books." A publisher encountered would say, cordially, "Let us see it by all means." Get it down to 160 pages -- less. No footnotes. One only, not really new, idea. The emerging rule seemed to be: "Never underrate the unfitness of readers, media, and publishers."

Yet it was like a drug, this pushing one into the marketplace, or like television, One succumbed from time to time, had a bad trip, and came away cursing himself for not having avoided the encounter. The condition of the publishing industry in America was unbelievably bad; would that it were terminal. All that could be said of it was that it was freer than publishing in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, or for that matter in most other countries. It was as bad or worse than the political system of the United State in meeting its obligations, much worse than the educational system with all its weakness.

But unhappy thoughts of this kind did not obsess Deg; they occurred often for a moment (as when he examined the book review section of the New York Times, or looked at a publisher's list). Long before, in the days when his work seemed ordinary, when his means of rewarding and insulting were conspicuously in readiness, publishing his books and articles was no problem.

The society, however, was enveloped in the myth that the publishing process was a logical affair, constrained tightly by the message between the covers. A writer's fortunes were thought to vary with the quality of his message. So many useless and dangerous myths rule society! Like the myth among scientists of myriad readers perusing their article in a reputable scientific journal -- 10,000? 5000? 500? yes, 50 and feel lucky.

Now, all of this jeremiad is preliminary to announcing that at certain point in time, probably it was in 1978, just after he began his final race against dwindling finances, Deg decided that he would, unless intercepted by an angel, proceed to complete his work and then by one means or another publish it himself. Somehow the money would be found, and he thought to publish it in Bombay, where he had connections with friends and a publisher, the Popular Book Depot, which had produced Kalos and Kalotics.

One premise he maintained firmly: he would not be finally frustrated and incapacitated by the publishing system. Another premise was his delusionary Paternoster: that what he attempted might be great importance to mankind. It was the best work he could set himself to -- and who else could do it -- none whom he knew of -- and his other great object in life, a new political order of the world, offered at this time no opportunity nor chance of success.

The decision was not easy, hardly definite in fact, because like many decisions he made, it was long foreseen and warmed upon a little burner in a recess of the mind. It was not an optimal solution, by any means. The myth, social binding, and conventions of publishing are so pervasive that none of his acquaintances thought this procedure wise, prudent, or even possible. All too poignant was his awareness that the controversial matter that he was writing would combine with its unorthodox publication into a hard prejudice against the books. Under such circumstances, more than a touch of megalomania is needed.

He pushed ahead imprudently, erratically, and stubbornly, or so it seemed to others, and they were correct, but they could not see how such failings of character might add up to an achievement. He wrote everywhere and under all conditions on all sizes and kinds of paper with pencils and pens of any type, and now and then on typewriters, electrical, or a portable, mechanical one. He read in several libraries, bought very few books, was sent Xerox copies of many pieces by Sizemore, Milton, and others, corresponded, and ultimately had made notes on some hundreds of books and articles. These were often caught on the wing, and he was often exasperated upon completing a book to have lost a citation, forgotten the spelling of a name, left relevant pieces now in Greece, now again in New York.

There is nothing special to recommend in his research and writing procedures except what one cannot anyhow imitate: a wide-cast unerring eye for the salient, the strong background of methodological -- especially epistemological -- thought and theory, a modest skill at writing, a great skill for synthesizing material, an inborn will to let nothing stand in one's way, a lifetime practice in doing much with little. Once in the while he got help; Donna Welensky, whom sometimes he paid for her typing and sometimes not, whom he came to love for her energy, efficiency, and ineffable kindness to the world, never mind her brawny blonde beauty.

The latter half of the dozen strenuous years were dominated, physically speaking, by the presence of a quiet deep-voiced dark-haired, brown-eyed, French novelist whom he encountered first at Naxos, where she was joyfully spending a few francs that her publisher had let her have as a consolation for not publishing her latest book, The Paladin. With great difficulty for her assets were almost literally on her back, she obtained a visa to come to America, and thenceforth Deg took care of her, and she took care of him. In 1982, they married. They lived in New York City, at Princeton, in Washington, on Naxos, and in Paris, appearing more affluent than they were or pretended to be.

They visited her ancestral village, Habsheim, between Basel and Mulhouse, they traveled to England, Italy, Hungary, and Canada. She loved the journeys and loved Deg and adapted quietly, imposingly, to the net of human ties and implausible projects of Deg with a broad, engaging and ever-ready smile. When Elisheva, sculptress forever, met her for the first time, she was awestruck at bones that made her strong hands ache for a chisel and hammer. "How did you find such beauty?" she asked Deg. She could be happier than anybody whom Deg had ever met, under the poorest conditions of life -- but then, as he often said to her, and she fully agreed, we are much better off than humanity is or has ever been or will be.

In more than a decade from 1972 to 1983 Deg gave over perhaps no more than eight months to work outside of quantavolution. Almost all of these few months was spent consulting directly and indirectly with the National Endowment for the Arts with Carl Stover, a friend of thirty years standing. Given a general directive and promoted by Carl before Nancy Hanks and Livingston Biddle, directors of the Endowment, Deg wrote a number of sketches of what might be done to stimulate a broad range of cultural areas, but principally he committed a trenchant irony called "1001 Question on Culture Policy" in which using the format of a book of interrogations, he was able to say all that he wanted to say. The work was an implication that nothing intelligent and basic was being said about public policy on the arts and humanities. Stover even managed to obtain from the Ford Foundation a subsidy with which to send copies of the work to most prominent leaders of the organization and direction of cultural affairs of the United States. Copies were also distributed in Western Europe. The effects, so far as might be perceived, and disregarding the encomia that are easily aroused by techniques of publicity, were nil.

Otherwise the quantavolution investigation progressed and enlarged grossly. By 1975 the basic Chaos and Creation was calving. The theory of Homo Schizo emerged and went one way,, ultimately two ways, in two volumes, one on the origins, one on human nature today. A great fragment fell out of Chaos and Creation and became a treatise on exoterrestrial aspects of geology, The Lately Tortured Earth. On a sojourn in Naxos there occurred an idea for an article explaining why the Pharaoh should have pursued the Jews in Exodus; quickly, stimulated by conversations with Anne-Marie, it transformed into a book of exhilarating discoveries and, in the end, God's Fire: Moses and the Management of Exodus.

He had already devised a theory of how the solar system might have enacted the set of quantavolutionary dramas which he had been uncovering and classifying. He wrote of it to Ralph Juergens. He found agreement there, and then he achieved the support of Earl Milton, Earl opted to come in on the enterprise of a book; Ralph became engaged, too, but hardly had Earl gone down to Flagstaff, Arizona, to go over their preliminary notes with him, than Juergens died suddenly, of a heart attack. Over several years, in Princeton, Washington, Manhattan, London, and Naxos, and by telephone and correspondence, Milton and Deg worked to complete the book. Its Index, in an unique format, which they named the Omnindex because it merged glossary, bibliography and key words, was finished at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D. C., on February 16, 1984.

The Moon and Mars book was standing by for revision. The Burning of Troy, its title taken from its first easy on the calcinology of Troy IIg, was organized to contain studies, reprints, essays, and notes. The Divine Succession was taken up; its central theory, that all gods are of the same family, was put forward; an anthropological and psychological discussion of the major aspects of religion followed. Then, as Deg stood back, gazing anxiously and unproud into the manuscript, there came to him the idea of adding two new proofs of the existence of gods, and also the scheme of a catechism for whosoever might wish to contemplate a possible new religion alongside the old.

There was left only The Cosmic Heretics, which I undertook to write. Its origins lay in Deg's intention, growing over some years, to write an autobiography in half-a-dozen volumes. He still nourishes the thought, cowering over the prospect of its passage through the gauntlet of fast-gathering, spiked-leather-fisted knights of time. But perhaps I can also do this job for him.

In 1980 he sent off Chaos and Creation to India for production. Delays were many. Stephanie Neuman lent him $3000 to defray some of its costs. He paid her back two years later. Funds came in from the sale of the book through the mails to lists of friends and of purchasers of William Corliss' Sourcebooks. Corliss himself sold copies. But larger sums were needed. They came from an advance of Ben Gingold, a friendly architect who intended to purchase land in Naxos from Deg, from cashing in 10% of the annuities that were to take care of his retirement, from yet another property sale, and from a personal bank loan. Household economies were the rule. The logic was simple: a small saving enabled thirty letters to be sent out, thirty letters might elicit a couple of orders. Deg and Aim moved into a dingy little brick house on an old street of Trenton, in a neighborhood that sociologists call by the menacing term "marginal."

Publishing in India was becoming costly. The Indian rupee which should have lost its international value, maintained itself steadily against the dollar, letting India pay its debts at a loss of export, but then it exported little anyhow. Nevertheless, Deg let himself in for a third round with Indian printers, sending off in early 1982 the bulky manuscript of The Lately Tortured Earth.

He rationalized his private publishing company in a memo to readers, but then decided not to print it in his book. Here is a better place for it, so I am carrying it:

Delays loomed up in India with Lately Tortured Earth so he turned to domestic production. Once again he had to review all of the possibilities for cheap book production in America. His initial constraints were several. He needed a secure conventional binding, preferably cloth or sewn. He could not publish in a large format, say 8 1/ 2 x 11 inches, because he wanted to put the book before the reader in a familiar form. He needed a bookish type font, an even right margin, running heads and other "luxuries" that American readers had come to expect and demand. He wished to insert many illustrations; this would be costly if they required redrawing or screening.

He observed the rush of new technical systems, computer memory word processing equipment, "perfect" glue binding machines, automatic cameras, small presses of various kinds and alternative Xeroxing machines. None of the products and suppliers with whom he treated had a clear perception of what his needs were and he found himself lecturing them about the greediness and unresponsiveness of industry that is set up to treat deferentially the unconscionable matter of junk mail and the industrial wordage of the culture -- and he would sound off sometimes on the gamut of the intellectual pariahs, the serious writers, artists, and scientists.

From time to time he would play with the design of an ideal system of personal and small-group publishing at a cost the humble creators of culture would afford. He put aside consideration of systems of microform production and distribution, because the fast culture was still too slow to accept them. He foresaw in the meanwhile a word processor with software for book-setting; a memory capable of handling a book as a whole; software for intelligent spelling and indexing and storing and addressing networks of acquaintances and potential customers; big readable screen; means of composing tightly and finely; a tape that could be stored and would feed a composer that could be slow but must print out a handsome book font and a generally useful caption font. Then the output, automatically paginated, would be pasted up on cards, the cards then printed in multiple copies on a reliable copying machine that could handle from one to a hundred copies of four pages (11" x 17") at a time, after which a collating machine could fold and merge the pages into a book that would then be placed into a thermal, glue-binding machine, capable of handling up to a 500- page text with its covers, be they cloth or card. Next the book would be trimmed, then, if cloth-bound, jacketed with a paper that had been produced by the same system. The small edition, by which Deg meant from fifty to five hundred copies, would be shelved until sold and shipped. Meanwhile the announcements would be coming out through the same system and would be addressed by the automatic print-out of the stored customer and complimentary lists. Small gadgets and work routines would be devised for the interfaces of the system components. The whole publishing company would fit in a garage or basement comfortably. It should not cost more than $20,000, including initial supplies, and a year's maintenance contract. It should be affordable with a $2000 down payment with the balance plus interest in extended payments over a 36-months period. Facilities for the bookmaking announcements, or its equivalent in magazine and pamphlet production would be provided; actually a much larger output would be possible.

The system he envisioned is quite feasible technically. Beginning in 1981, Deg could set forth the named components and locate their suppliers to provide a complete system in the range of $30,000, but the system would have uneconomic, inefficient, superfluous, and flawed elements. The field was moving rapidly. At some moment, it could be brought together and a revolution in publishing accomplished. Or rather, what would happen is that the great majority of thousands of creative groups of the nation would cut themselves off effectively from the commercial and university press publishers, building firmly and at a cost they might afford the printed communication network which they needed if they were to survive. When a company called the Who's Who of Contemporary Authors circularized him, asking the usual information and adding a request for "words from the wise," he wrote (May 18, 1981):

He never got around to seeing whether they printed it. Nothing approaching a new full mini-publishing system was achieved by Deg with the Quantavolution Series. The name "Metron" meaning "Measure" was revived from a personal reporting, consulting, and publishing company he had employed mostly in the 1950's and 1960's to put out the American Behavioral Scientist, the Universal Reference System, and books and reports. Now it was to be the name of the first quantavolutionary publisher. The means of publication were only half-new, a melange of all ordinary systems. Word-processing with photo-composition by large machines, Compugraphic composition, and old hot-type linotype systems and by already old-style small offset presses. Bindings ranged from Smyth-sewn cloth-covered board binding to new compact "perfect" thermal binding. Deg designed all the covers and the format, under heavy constraints of format, color, and costs.

The printing and publishing industry was in a technological and marketing revolution and it was annihilating the old breeds of manuscript-evaluator, copy-editor, proof-readers, and designer. All of these operation now were more expensive and provided less reliable and competent services. Deg arranged much of the composition, printing, and binding with Rick Bender of the Princeton University computer center and with the University's Printing Services. They became adept at running small editions in the interstices of time that occur with a large computer and photocompositor.

In all, the labor of his wife and himself as designers, editors, typist, clerks and managers of production and distribution, would have cost $65,000 to purchase as services on the open market. Direct research and overhead costs (actually paid out or otherwise absorbed) came to about $60,000 over the whole time; direct production costs amounted to $41,500; early mailings and advertising cost $6,000. Without any allowances for the author's time or advances against royalties (he being the author), the total real cost amounted to $172,500. The total number of books produced was only about 6,000, and many of these were not intended for sale. The editions were numbered. The average real (but not cash) cost per book, then, not including any compensation for the author, amounted to $28.80 per copy.

When I spoke to him before turning this page over to the printer (taking care not to be seen laughing) the returns had totalled $7,500. He expected receipts to reach $30,000 in a year's time and finish off the balance of immediate direct costs, $17,500, during the second year. This would also exhaust the first edition copies. The main chance of compensating for the $125,000 of other non-monetary but poignantly real costs would be to sell rights for new editions to other publishers As for the royalties of the author, in our simulated account here, these would have to wait until further new editions were issued, and were ticketed for archival expenses. Apparently the avant-garde or heretical author is frustrated whether by the publishing business or in his own efforts to reach out and communicate. Deg was continually irritated by the ignorance of the intelligentsia concerning the engine rooms of the ships carrying them. They are brainwashed by the language of Hollywood, in the markets of best-sellers, and in the display quantities of ads of rich corporations. The intellectuals, with few exceptions, inflict upon their creative brethren the oppressive standards of the rotten rich -- fame, money, connections. Dick Cornuelle and Deg enjoyed examining some of the exquisite typography, color-drenched illustrations, and perfect printing that went into annual reports of companies which had bought dearly Cornuelle's more than ample writing talents. No expense, no technology, no skill was spared to convey to some thousands of barely interested shareholders and stockbrokers how well or badly the managers had run their affairs during the year. The annual report, no matter how expensively published, was but a trifle in their operating costs of the year. Yet it would have covered the costs of publishing beautifully fifty creative works.

Where are all these creative works? Is that the objection? Most of them are abortions of a culture of intellectual and science prostitution. They do not appear because they cannot be carried to full term. They do not appear because they expire too in their creator's archives. And this is why Deg, as he came to the end of the Quantavolution Series and I near the end of telling its history, began to harangue his family and intimates to set up an Institute for Creative Archives. A billion dollars a year, he claimed, is the cultural loss to the American nation of the death of the archives of its creative workers. This was a real loss, not registered in the unselective National Economy's Accounting System. He wanted to do something about it.