There are certain necessary and recurrent tasks that are so
onerous and unpleasant that they can be accomplished only by the application
of external physical duress or the nearly supernatural engagement of will
power. In general, at least in my
life, these have to do with cleaning up messes of one kind or another. I absolutely hate tidying my study, for
example. My view is that if a
house must look lived in to be livable, a workplace must look worked in to be
workable. This theory, which aims to elevate slovenliness to the rank of the
virtues, is unfortunately effective only to a limited degree. All too soon the books and papers on
the desk become so many and so miscellaneous as to form a kind of haystack in
which one’s actual “work” of the moment plays the inglorious role of needle.
Gutter-cleaning
is another periodic purgatory.
Though nearly a third of our trees have been blown down by the huge
winds of recent years, you would think we lived in the heart of a deciduous
forest from the state of the drainpipes.
Over the years I have bought every patented “gutter-guard” device on the
market. They always work perfectly
in the ads, but they somehow fail miserably on the actual gutters. The only solution, painful and slow, is
a bloguiste on a ladder, moving very slowly around the periphery of the whole
house with incrementally scraped knuckles.
Yet
gutter-cleaning is less awful than desk-tidying in one important regard. I am not personally responsible for creating the gutter mess. To be forced to face the results of
one’s own iniquity always has a special awfulnessness about it. What all this is building up to is
this: I have just completed a fortnight of torment reading and correcting the
proof sheets of a four hundred page book in the process of publication.
As
we look back on printing history we are inclined to regard Gutenberg’s great
advances in creating movable type in terms of an increased capacity for
production and distribution. It
took a long time to copy out a book in handwriting. It took a bit longer to set one up in type, but once that
was done you could then print off a hundred of them, or a thousand, in the time
it would take to make a second manuscript. But the early printers rarely talked about that huge and
obvious advantage. What they tended to brag about was that it
was now possible to guarantee the integrity of a text because it had been read
and corrected in proof by the author or editor. Every book, in theory, had the authority of a holograph.
But
what was a great relief for a publisher might be an equally great anxiety for
an author. The “printer’s error”
is, after all, a great convenience for a writer, as its invocation might plausibly
shield him from the consequences of his own folly. That is why for a long time editors actually made authors sign the corrected sheets. I haven’t experienced that intimidating
ritual in a while. That’s probably
because most printing these days involves an electronic technology in which a
computer file is transformed directly into print. Under these circumstances there are no more “printer’s
errors”. There are only author’s or
editor’s errors. And the number of
them that you can rack up in four hundred pages is pretty discouraging.
There
is a technical bibliographic term beloved of graduate students in English: foul papers. The term says it all. Foul papers are the really messed up, crossed out, and
scribbled over bundles of verbal protoplasm that were the germs of some of
Shaespeare’s plays. Once, in what
I must regard as the good old days, I received from a Belgian printing house
the proof sheets of a fairly long article in which the word the appeared as thq two hundred and twelve times. Circling every one of those suckers with a red pencil gave
me a considerable feeling of accomplishment. There is no such cheap grace in finding twenty-six tabulated
pages or errors in a book set directly from the computer disk submitted!
Foul Papers
The
English word proof has now wandered a
fair distance from its original meaning, which still exists is some proverbial
expressions often used but seldom understood, such as “The exception proves the
rule” or “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” The main challenge of proof-reading, apart from the constant
danger of sudden death by terminal boredom, is that the human eye struggles to
see not what is there, but what it
knows ought to be there. And if in the first place you wrote the
text being eyeballed, you are fatally certain of what ought to be there. Your eyes tend to approve some platonic version of what you think you wrote rather than
what you actually wrote. That’s
why you missed it the first time.
The
only thing that allows my blog posts even a spurious façade of typographical accuracy
is Joan’s eagle eye. She has just
earned yet another oak leaf cluster on her heavily laden marital Croix de
Guerre by proofing the equivalent of a hundred and twenty-five blog posts
back-to-back. A masochistic
friend, Eli Schwartz, likewise read the whole “first-pass” book. The slightly scary thing is that
several glaring errors appeared uniquely in each of the three catalogues of
error. Eli alone noted a passage
in which I have Louis XIV, who died in 1715, presiding over certain events of
the 1730s!. But then, in the
immortal words of some typographical aphorist of Renaissance, “No book is
completed until Error hath crept in
and affixed his sly Imprimatur”.
