At long last, the much corrected reprint to my An Introduction to Formal Logic (CUP, originally 2003) has arrived on my desk and is in stock at the publishers. It’s been a bit of a saga, but worth the effort. All the needed corrections which I originally listed on the web pages for the book have been made, and there are dozens of other small improvements scattered through the book.
Students: it will be much less irritating getting the corrected version even if it costs a bit more than a second-hand copy of the first printing. The paperback is relatively cheap anyway, and the new version is significantly better.
Colleagues: if you are using the book to teach from, don’t worry. Even though the new version is an improvement, and some things are better explained, you won’t have to change your lectures and classes much if at all!
Phew! Well, thank heavens that’s over. I just hope it is more than three days before I notice the first misprint in the new version …
Torkel’s method is not be shunned, either. In his Inexhaustibility he informs the readers all remaining errors are due to his wife. I’ll be sure to adopt this device, of blaming all possible errors on Torkel’s wife, should I ever publish anything.
One is reminded of the following moving piece of maundering from the preface of Descriptive Set Theory and Forcing: How to Prove Theorems about the Borel Sets the Hard Way:
Departing from the usual author’s statement — I would like to say that I am not responsible for any of the mistakes in this document. Any mistakes here are the responsibility of the reader. If anybody wants to point out a mistake to me, I promise to respond by saying “but you know what I meant to say, don’t you?”
Congratulations once again.. One way to avoid finding more typos, etc. in the book would be to adopt an analogous approach what I call the Nicole Kidman or John Malkovich stance: they say that they prefer not watching their own performances :-)