Benjamin Dreyer, the copy chief of Random House, writes for the NY Times (archived) about his life as a copyeditor (or, as he puts it, copy editor); his origin story is unsurprising (he noticed errors even as a kid and was eventually pointed to a profession where you could be paid for it), but the anecdotes are a lot of fun:
Proofreading a new edition of a 50-year-old translation of a French classic, I was stopped in my tracks by a section of a half-dozen or so unattributed lines of dialogue in which one line seemed to be missing. He said, I pointed with my finger, she said, he said, she said … she said again? (It’s an indication of my stubborn faith in the printed word that I had to run my finger down that passage several times before I was sure that the error was on the page and not in my head.)
As it happened, the novel’s translator was still alive, and he was (I was told) delighted to fill in the missing line, which had apparently gone unnoticed all this time.
A more elaborate version of this story occurred a number of years later, when a puzzled email from a reader about what appeared to be a continuity glitch in a major work of 20th-century science fiction inspired me to do a bit of detective work. Assisted by a book pirate’s online post of the entire text, I uncovered eight paragraphs that had somehow gone missing decades before.
How can this happen? you might be wondering. I can’t be certain, but I infer that in the translation of the book from its original hardcover version to a mass-market paperback, an overburdened editorial assistant, tasked with photocopying the original, skipped a spread — two consecutive pages, a left and a right, that is. Or perhaps that assistant dropped the spread on the floor, and because the missing text, improbably and unluckily, began at the beginning of a sentence and concluded at the end of one, the gap went unremarked. (To be fair, this particular book drones on so uneventfully for pages and pages that one could be forgiven for not noticing that some of the drone was absent.) Of course, we fixed the error.
I’m just glad some publishers are still bothering to fix such errors. (Of course, one can’t help wondering what that “major work of 20th-century science fiction” was, but we’ll never know.)
Surely it can only be Dune …
his life as a copyeditor (or, as he puts it, copy editor)
Duel at dawn with Wite-Out brushes?
(he noticed errors even as a kid and was eventually pointed to a profession where you could be paid for it)
No profession can do without such people, or rather such entities. Sez the Wipe on Quality Control: “a process by which entities review the quality of all factors involved in production”.
There’s even an unpaid, popular version of this: censoriousness.
– A major work of the 20th century sci-fi.
– Translated
– Drones on and on.
Solaris?
Solaris the novel actually moves along quite briskly (and is not really all that long, either.)
I don’t think the SF novel in question is stated to be translated (which would certainly rule out my own preferred candidate.)
I myself was thinking of late Heinlein, though I’m not sure the term “major work” is applicable.
I read Solaris just two months ago in a German translation. There are far too many pages describing the morphodynamic antics of The Thing, and even more pages from historical descriptions. Trippy droning.
But hey, it would be another 10 years until lava lamps and psychedelic projections were invented to take some of the pressure off prose.
As it transpired, Picnic won that round after all.
This feels vaguely familiar. That is, I vaguely remember looking at a sentence on one page, and then looking at the continuation on the next, and thinking that the continuation didn’t make sense; that some text was missing.
But I cannot for the life of me remember where I might have seen it.
The same sort of error might have occurred in more than one instance, of course.
I note that his twitter feed has some annotations to the article (for example, he found the picture book of the Navajo weaver, and shows the illustration and the text he references).
Also, the concept of translation, in the sense of direct and immediate transportation (into heaven).
Maybe he’ll answer about what book he mentions? I don’t have twitter myself to ask, though.
Edit: Someone already asked. Will he answer?
https://twitter.com/sorrykb/status/1571497080409198592
There are far too many pages describing the morphodynamic antics of The Thing
True, on maturer reflection. I spoke foolishly and without due circumspection.
Still, it is at least (comparatively) short overall.
(The main thing that put me off, as often with Lem, was the rather leaden satirical tone. He’s OK when he keeps clear of that.)
I still like Dune for the work in question, combining (as it does) accepted (and merited) classic status with also having long passages which could with advantage have been left on the cutting-room floor. Many works of SF (like late Heinlein) qualify on the latter feature; fewer also qualify on the former.
The main thing that put me off, as often with Lem, was the rather leaden satirical tone.
Yes! That’s my main gripe as well.
Tell me, Hat: how does a copyeditor manage to edit an unreadable book (to them, anyway)?
I’ve done some copyediting (yeah-yeah, not of my own posts), and I enjoyed it, but I would not be able to work on Heidegger or Lacan to save my life.
Those two are relatively unproblematic. Just have a rubber stamp made so you can stamp “needs clarification” anywhere you want. Orthographic flubs fade into insignificance.
Tell me, Hat: how does a copyeditor manage to edit an unreadable book (to them, anyway)?
Painfully. Fortunately, I rarely had that experience, but when I did, I wished I’d charged more…
The same sort of error might have occurred in more than one instance, of course.
Arno Schmidt reports a similar case in Das Leptothe=Herz (the essay doesn’t seem to be online). In a German translation of Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre text went missing, so that one page ended with Leptothe= (the beginning of the word Leptotherium), and the next started with Herz “heart”, resulting in the nonsensical Leptothe heart. (It’s a while since I read that essay; IIRC he uses this as an example of how negligently Verne is / was treated in the German literary world.)
It’s a game. Take a torn newspaper and read the column whose right or left half is absent. That is, when you see
устали от бескон[.
цесса, ……. .. .. .. [
you read
устали от бесконцесса.
If Dreyer doesn’t reveal the identity of the book, the Science and Fantasy Stack Exchange should probably be able to figure it out.
… how does a copyeditor manage to edit an unreadable book (to them, anyway)?
If I have to edit in molecular genetics – or similar realms of exquisitely uncertain meanings and hermetically sealed shoptalk – I at least make sure of conformity with the literature, and of course internal consistency. Google (general, books, ngram viewer, scholar) helps a helluvalot, even before cracking open JSTOR or the more focused resources. I also draw on a stock of comprehensive reasonably up-to-date textbooks. In such ways, and by “feeling” the subsurface flow of sense even if I don’t grasp it explicitly, I fix innumerable gaffes that experts in the field regularly commit – or are blind to when they’re asked to check the writing of their peers. In the sciences, propriety with formulae (SI units, spacing, italics, punctuation) is an elementary beginning.
Editors, like philosophers, are generalist outsiders. Being both an editor and a philosopher, I deploy obsessive panoptical surveillance and am sought after for it. More work than I want. Hatters may apply if they’d like to subcontract. I’ll keep any Heidegger (for the philological interest); but you can have the Lacan.
For my part, being both a programmer and a code reviewer, I deploy obsessive panoptical surveillance and am sought after for it. However, many of those who must correct their code as a consequence of my findings do not seek me out. They are quite naturally resentful of the guy who finds glass shards in their homemade pies.
So I often write code that calls their code and causes it to crash, then more code showing how to avoid this, and include these examples in my findings. This demonstrates that I know what I’m talking about, and goes some way towards smoothing ruffled feathers.
There is no style manual as court of final appeal. Every day is high noon in Hadleyville.
For every ten things I know, there are a million I don’t know. I learned what I know – what’s good, what’s bad – from reading the code of other people over 35 years, and stress-testing it in my work. Too many programmers think going it alone is the way to go.
For every ten things I know, there are a million I don’t know.
This is the most important lesson life has to teach us.
I occasionally notice questionable renderings of spoken interviews, but this post brings a new sort of imperfection to mind.
I read a newspaper article warning about a toxic chemical found in the blood of many in the US; it noted that the most common source of that chemical is the weed-killer brand Roundup.
Then, the next day, while reading unrelated text on a different website, up popped a customized ad–for Roundup.
This is the most important lesson life has to teach us.
Not “don’t put your hand on a hot stove”? That’s a very painful lesson I learnt as a kid. 😉
“Don’t put your hand on a hot stove” is one of the million things kids don’t know initially. Then it becomes one of the things they learn painfully, along with “don’t stick your fork in the electrical outlet” and “don’t pull the cat’s tail before putting on your fencing mask”.
In high school, I found chemistry explanations not very convincing. Teach showed us a vial of (I think it was) concentrated sulphuric acid, which looked glassy and not at all dangerous – contrary to what he said. So after class I stole that vial, took it home and put a drop on my arm.
Boy howdy !!! Burn much ? At least I had the presence of mind not to try to wipe it off and thus spread it around. I think I held my arm under the tap so that the water could run off the side, not down the length of my arm.
How could I be so stupid in the act, and so wise in the aftermath ? There’s a lesson in there, but to this day I haven’t found it.
That’s a prime example for the old saying “what doesn’t kill you gives you a great story to tell”.
It’s true that the story is more polished each time I tell it.
As was no doubt the arm (Dr. Stu’s Miracle Depilator).
For every ten things I know, there are a million I don’t know.
I know, having learned it at a young age, that when someone tells you a spray-paint can is empty, it may not be entirely empty.
I still don’t know if there’s a little shutter in the nozzle which you might see opening when putting your eye close to it and pressing the button.
I certainly hope so!
Zuerst das Wasser, dann die Säure, sonst passiert das Ungeheure.
My life lesson for today: if you happen to drop a soldering iron, don’t reach out blindly and grab it because you will inevitably grab the hot end.
From my very limited experience of copy-editing, I found that the most difficult part was reading what was actually in front of me. Copy-editing is a skill that requires a huge amount of concentration, knowledge and logical thought process and taught me just how lacking I am in all three.
the most difficult part was reading what was actually in front of me
If you wrote it yourself, this becomes virtually impossible. (Which is why we need copy-editors …)
How could I be so stupid in the act, and so wise in the aftermath ?
The teach [even if it was a typo, it is so good that I am going to use it] probably told you what to do if you have an accidental spill and in a fraction of a second you’ve learned to trust the teach (if only on this point).
You’re probably right. In thinking more about it, I find it hard to believe that, in a split second, I deduced from first principles, out of thin air, all those first-aid moves.
About “teach” = “teacher”: this is an antiquated, smart-aleck way of addressing a teacher (not recommended), or referring to them in their absence, as used by some US school children. Sometime in the ancient past, or maybe mostly in novels about the same.
I had a middle school drama and journalism teacher who sometimes told us stories about her early years teaching English, as an inexperienced twenty-one year old in the mid-1970s. One of her problem students apparently consistently addressed her as “teach.”
About “teach” = “teacher”: …
Compare Hat’s own occasional use of preach (n). Or is that an imperative, when he writes “Preach!”? We know little of such gospelling, in Australia.
That’s an imperative, which could be expanded to “Preach it!”
Ah, imperative. Thanks, Teach. But you can see why I wondered:
“Hey Preach! What’s all this talk about memorials, Preach?”
– Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(All foreign to us Austlanders.)