Dear Agnes
Yellowing Leaves: Proofreading and Copy-editing
I am sorry that we have not had the chance to meet since your elevation to editorial manager. Quite a step up for you! I remember just how incompetent you were as an editorial assistant a couple of years ago, fresh from Cambridge clutching your degree certificate! Just joking, of course; I’m sure you have cottoned on to the various uses of the apostrophe since then. Proofreading was clearly not your thing. And I understand from a fellow author that copy-editing was not an alpha subject either. Attention to detail is perhaps not so important now you have reached such heights. Promotion is the great saviour.
What a waspish old so-and-so I sound! I live firmly in the past where copy-editors and proofreaders used to fret over errors, however small.
Well, I’m told that they still do in other publishing houses. But sadly not in yours which, of course, is also mine, for the time being.
You may have gathered from my tone that I am not entirely happy with the service I have received from your department. Tim, my copy-editor, has been charm itself and is to be commended for his choice of wine when we had our somewhat frugal introductory lunch. But his knowledge of the rudiments of English language is on a par with that of my non-too-bright labrador. He introduced a number of errors and corrected none. He made no useful comments and raised no queries other than to ask whether I still insisted on my rather “old-fashioned” middle initial.
Proofreading, and I use the term with deliberate looseness, was passed to Jemima to whom I have spoken on the telephone. Again, her charm was initially disarming. She explained quite sweetly that the company could not afford to send her on a proofreading training course, but that she had a first from my old college, as it happens, and that she would pick it up as she went along. (OMG! I think is appropriate, but I’m usually a decade or so out with abbreviations and acronyms.) I don’t know what it was that she “picked up” in proofreading Yellowing Leaves from the Grave but it was certainly not any of the slipshod typesetting, literals, typos and assorted spacing disasters which all but smothered the book from start to finish. No doubt she could hold her own in a superficial discussion of modernist fiction but until she is promoted beyond life’s irksome details I doubt her usefulness.
I am so looking forward to the little launch party which Sir Peter is throwing in Meeting Room 8 for Yellowing Leaves. He and I go back to the time when he held a similar position in the company to yours and he dealt with my first book (Glad Green Leaves), copy-editing and proofreading it himself, as I remember. Rather well! You shan’t mind too much I hope if I tease you a little about that at the gathering. I’m sure he’ll be amused.
Sincerely yours
Ivor Spleenisshe