“Work at your book even now; build your story piece by piece and bit by bit and as perfect as possible. Of course it will have to be gone over and corrected when the time comes, but you will have much done anyway.
—Harry Loose to Harold Sherman, July 21, 1942

From Volume 1 of The Sherman Diaries:
As much as possible in the Diaries I have let the Shermans tell their own story, but when this could not be done I, with Matthew Block, wrote narrative bridges between episodes. In excerpting paragraphs from Harold Sherman’s books, I rearranged their order when the narrative called for it. I also changed “Mrs. Sherman” to “Martha” and made similar substitutions for better continuity. In his letters Harold had a tendency to underline and capitalize many words for emphasis, so to allow the reader to absorb his ideas without prejudice, I lowercased the capitalizations and reduced the amount of italicization.

Harry Loose’s letters presented a bigger challenge. Many were undated, and because his letters frequently crossed in the mail with Harold’s, matching both sets chronologically was a big task. While no significant revisions of Loose’s letters have been made, I permitted myself, because of his habit of typing for hours at a time without looking back, to correct errors of spelling, punctuation and usage. I also added paragraph divisions. In cases where Loose jumped back and forth between topics within a letter, I rearranged the order and grouped related subject matter together for better comprehensibility. A word in square brackets either indicates a word added to make the sentence understandable or represents several words combined for clarity, but nothing was inserted because it expressed my own beliefs or omitted because it opposed them.

--Saskia Praamsma