Consideration is that quaint thing that often gets slain when bottomline dwellers make production increases the only aim of an industry.

That happened to a book I worked on, though only in one chapter — we asked for the typesetter to change “Me.” to “Maine” and had no idea it would be done as a global fix. Five “Me”s that weren’t references to Maine became “Maine” (as in the Smokey Robinson song “You Really Got a Hold on Maine”). The corrections were corrected, it didn’t seem as if any other lines had changes, and it went out that way. My greatest professional shame.

By the way, all that stuff about the author submitting electronic files, which are edited on computer and passed on to the text freelancers in electronic form? Speak for yourself. We use the hardcopy manuscript as our version of record. We very much prefer that the manuscript be accompanied by its e-text version, but not all authors use computers, and you absolutely can’t count on freelancers using standardized software or matching your procedures. Given a choice between a mediocre copyeditor who’s up to the minute on Word, and an excellent copyeditor who still uses CPM, I’ll take the CPM-user every time.

Ditto.

I have worked for two different small publishers in which the boss insisted on skipping copyediting entirely (and then wondered why there were so many E.A.s in proof).

That happens on a few books published by huge companies, too. If they pay the author a huge advance, often they want to recoup it immediately, so they cut the time to produce the book down to nothing. It’s insane — at Simon & Schuster you’d be working for a company that would move a $150 million movie out three months to maximize its box office receipts, but you’d be rushing through a book just so a $750,000 advance could be recouped the same quarter it (or most of it) was paid out.

Yes. The whole job has changed.

Since by then most books were being printed on offset presses, I always wondered why publishers didn’t just hire some nice freelance calligrapher to render the equations as art. It would have been much easier than getting them set in type.

Given the nature of the error, we can’t tell whether or not someone at HarperCollins checked the integrity of the F&Gs before signing off on the repro. For all we know, they did. It still wouldn’t have forestalled the problem, because the best-checked set of F&Gs in the world won’t yield non-defective copies if the signatures are being miscollated at the bindery.

Maha, if you’ve only run into missing or miscollated signatures a couple of times, you’ve been lucky in your printers. It used to be a rarity. The incidence of signature miscollation problems started climbing when the big print-and-bind operations replaced the pressmen who’d overseen the production line with automated monitoring devices. They’re cheaper than human beings, but they make more mistakes; and when they make big mistakes, they do it with enthusiasm and vigor.

(I haven’t been hearing about defective copies as often as I did a few years ago. Maybe the printers have been gradually debugging their hardware. It would be nice to think so.)

Usually it’s only a fraction of the print run that’s defective. The standard procedure, if you find you’ve bought a bad copy, is to take it to your nearest bookstore and exchange it. Most bookstores will do that even if you bought it elsewhere, because they know the publisher will give them full credit for the return.

For real excitement, try getting signatures from another book by another publisher mistakenly bound into one of your books. As Murphy would have it, the first time that happened to one of my titles, it was a signature from a steamy husband-and-wife book about how to have great married sex, and it was bound into the middle of a YA fantasy novel.

There’s not much use in complaining. The big print-and-bind outfits have been buying up and shutting down their competitors. Threatening to go to another supplier just doesn’t have the credibility it used to.

I continue to be appalled at the idea that major publishing houses might be signing off on repro without physically checking the F&Gs. It’s a small step that keeps you from making extremely expensive errors. Sooner or later, bad stuff is bound to happen. And there’s another consideration: many production procedures are still based on the assumption, inherited from the old hot-type days, that if you’ve checked something and found it had no errors, and you haven’t touched it since, it will continue to have no errors. You can’t be certain of that when everything’s digital.

The only way I can imagine not checking them yourself is if you have a contract with the plant that says that in exchange for the convenience of not having to send you sets of physical F&Gs, they’ll undertake to check them for you, and take the rap if something goes wrong.

(Since we’re all swapping resumes: I’m the former Managing Editor of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc., a.k.a. Tor/Forge/Orb. I started out as a typesetter thirty years ago.)