Book launch: "Imaging Optics" by Joseph Braat and Peter Török
Joseph Braat, a former professor of optics in the ImPhys department, has finally wrapped up his contribution to the book Imaging Optics. The book was officially published in print by Cambridge University Press on the 2nd of May 2019. In the below text, you can read about his book-writing Odyssey of 10 years.
Start of the book-writing
Instead of a simple copy-paste of the Preface of Imaging Optics, I present you here a brief history of the writing of this rather thick book (almost one thousand densely printed pages). It all started in 2008 after my retirement from TU Delft, with the first written lines in the very beginning of 2009. I had made a subject list for a book on imaging in optics, an important topic in optical teaching and in applied optics for science and industry. As the list of subjects became rather long, I started actively looking for a co-author. Previous talks with a colleague from Imperial College London, Peter Török, had shown that he was interested to contribute to such a book. Having personally started already the writing of several subjects/chapters, we agreed upon a detailed distribution of tasks in 2012. The book would consist of three parts; a general background part, a second part on imaging techniques using geometrical optics as the underlying model and a third part dealing with diffraction optics and high-resolution imaging.
Perseverance phase
In the meantime, I had produced already quite some text (in UK-English), in a way which might look a little bit old-fashioned. My writing method has been copied from Harold Hopkins. As a young researcher at Philips Research, in the 1970s, I was connected by the management to Harold Hopkins who was an optics advisor of the research laboratory. Harold generally called me Tiny Tim, because of my tall and meagre appearance in those days and continuously encouraged me during lunches and dinner to eat much more. In long working sessions in Eindhoven or Reading, sometimes lasting a whole week, I could follow his meticulous method of `attack’ when a new optical theory or model had to be developed, appropriate for quantitative calculations by engineers. Using his fountain pen (and chalk on the blackboard), he started with drawings of coordinate axes, definition of variables, names of functions, directions of optical rays, shapes of wavefronts, etc. And then, step by step, without the omission of apparently trivial intermediate results, he progressed slowly but inexorably to a satisfactory end result, two or three days later. In the meantime, quite some scrap paper had disappeared in the waste paper basket. But the end result was crystal clear and easily accessible to a broader audience. Those of you who have read Hopkins’ famous papers on diffraction theory and optical imaging or have spoken with people who have followed his courses at Imperial College know that his writing and teaching style were fabulous. It seemed to me that it would be a very good idea to copy his writing method. The only thing which changed was the fountain pen, it became a ballpoint pen. I noticed that, indeed, by using this step-by-step approach, a better line of thought develops in the text and clarifying drawings are introduced at an early stage. And that much scrap paper is produced which, in my case, was kept for storage in files. At a later stage it is useful to see why a reasoning was rejected or in which way an equation error was discovered. The end result is that today I have four thick folders of scrap paper in which I can track previous sign errors, missing factors of two, etc. Proceeding in this way I quickly noticed that I could write approximately 100 pages a year (given the dense print in the current published book). Of course, this work includes the making of computer drawings or diagrams and all computations (with the aid of MatLab or Fortran programs) which produce the numerical results for two- and three-dimensional graphs and for numerical tables.
Throughout the book-writing years, it turned out that the original distribution of subjects from 2012 did not work out. I was the lucky retired author spending all his time on one subject, Peter Török had to run a research group, teach courses, travel around the world etc., his writing progress was inevitably much less than mine. There have been moments in time that the book was in peril, but I have carried on until the end of 2017 when all the subjects of the book were finally covered. If you read the Preface of the published book, you can see which chapters and sections have been written by each of the two authors.
First contacts with the `market’
With the vast majority of subjects already covered, a new interesting phase started at the end of 2016, the reading of the chapters by the two critical readers. This phase, with several iterations, sometimes up to four(!), has lasted for some fifteen months. The two critical readers, Matthew Foreman and Peter Nuyens, have done an extremely important job. They provided the authors with large-scale suggestions about the structure of a chapter but also signalled detailed errors in the text, sloppy definitions, undefined variables, missed references, etc. They gave a serious boost to the final quality of the book! Almost in parallel with the critical reading there was the search for an editing house. Much writing effort had been invested in the past years but there was the open question: would there be a market for such a book? In the spring of 2017 I have contacted seven publishing houses with one major request, the selling price of the book should not exceed 75 UK pounds, 90 € or 110 US $. Each publisher received the table of contents and three sample chapters (some 250 pages) of the book. I made it a serious affair by using watermarks, encrypted content and double passwords. Quite surprisingly for me, in the two, three months afterwards, I received 21 reviews of the sample chapters, three from each publisher! Most of them were relatively superficial, but some went into quite some detail (and the book text could immediately profit from these observations). There was a big relief, the reactions were all very positive. For the simple reason, I think, that it is rather seldom that a textbook with such a size is presented to the publishing market. Three companies (Springer, Wiley and Elsevier) did not proceed any further when they discovered that the maximum price mentioned above was a capital issue for me. One smaller editor thought that the book was too voluminous for him, three others were relatively slow in their reactions (summer period). Finally, it was Cambridge University Press (CUP) that wanted to sign a publishing contract already `tomorrow’. They have insisted quite a lot by phone and e-mail and the authors were happy to sign a contract in November 2017.
Wrap-up phase
Since then, the usual phases of publishing a larger-scale book have passed by. First of all, for price reasons, a complete black-and-white book had to be submitted, in LaTeX, comprising the final text for at least 99%. For various reasons, the conversion of some forty figures from colour to grey tone took me almost two months. Once having at his disposal the final text, the copy-editor started his work. The book should be adapted to the CUP house style, any offence against the English language and UK-English in particular had to be eradicated. I guess that some twenty-five thousand interventions have taken place in the text, mainly concerning the change to the CUP house-style. After five months, with each two weeks a list with typically thirty or forty queries, the copy-editing work was finished in August 2018. In the seven following months up to March 2019, three proofs of the book have been produced. The first one reduced the LaTeX text from 1150 pages down to 930. In my case, being the older author, there was a serious reading problem with a font size of definitely less than 9 pt. We found a compromise at a font size of 9.0 pt since the 1000-page size of the book was a hard limit for CUP. Finally, the third proofs became the printed book as it is now on the market. Some close reading of the third proofs (and the printed book) revealed some 30 to 40 minor errors that will be put as Errata on the webpage of the book. Another sixty `minor-squared’ typographic errors are waiting for a revised edition to be incorporated in the text. A book without errors simply does not exist!
Looking back, I have to say that the book-writing effort was rather underestimated by me, which is a necessary condition to start writing a 1000-page book. By the way, I am in good company. The author of Modern Electrodynamics, Andrew Zangwill, states that he worked for seventeen years on his book. I can confirm that I never got bored by the work itself, each subject was different and asked for its proper way of presentation. Moreover, I learned a lot myself! And, of course, the satisfaction in the end, to see and touch the finished physical book, is an unforgettable experience.
I add a colour-illustration (quite a luxury for me after Imaging Optics) to show that the book probably has many other applications. In this case some younger children found their own way with the book.
8 May 2019,
Joseph Braat
