The year 1977 also saw the publication of Stanford's most substantial and influential book, "The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You". A joint publication by Mill Mountain Press and Lost Roads (taking up numbers 7–12 in the Lost Roads catalog), the published version of the epic (which had, at one point, according to Stanford, reached over 1,000 pages and 40,000 lines) settled at 542 pages (383 pages in the second, 2000, edition) In an April 1974 letter, Stanford comments that poet Alan Dugan had written to him with the response, "This is better than good, it is great ... one day it will explode."