Today we added pages 496 to 513, transcribed by Megan Cahill, and pages 514 to 524, transcribed by Ben Frischer. This completes—months ahead of schedule—the initial transcription of the first seven years of Van Buskirk’s diary—221,406 words, 584 pages of diary, a text longer than Moby-Dick and just short of Steinbeck’s East of Eden. This is, of course, not the full fifty years of Van Buskirk’s journaling. It is, however, the portion we set out to transcribe. We now turn to a comprehensive editing of the text.

People have asked me how many typed pages we’ve completed. With one-inch margins, 12 point font, and double-spacing, a page of text is typically about 250 words, which means we’ve produced a manuscript of approximately 885 pages.