Blogorrhea Junior

Rogue Copy Editors

When I first moved to New York, I worked at a legal publisher and learned the fine art of copy editing and proofreading.  You'd think being a writer and English major would already be good preparation for that, and it is, but only to a certain extent. Copy editing and proofreading require an entirely different mindset than writing does. Proofreading, especially, means training your eye to focus on spelling and punctuation, on the way sentences look, rather than on extracting the information in them. Copy editing less so; you're still reading for sense, but only in a very superficial way. You're more worried about whether the sentence is clearly expressed and tightly constructed than about the overarching argument. Clearly, that depends on the level of copy editing, too, which can vary from slightly above proofreading to a substantive rewrite.

The trouble is, once you train your eye to see these things, you see them everywhere. It's a curse. The misplaced, overused apostrophe; the misspellings, the horrible grammar become a form of constant torture. Chinese take-out menus seem to be the worst, which is understandable. At least it's a translation from another language, and God knows English is an extremely confusing language with contradictory and absurd rules. But some of the worst offenders are (ready for it?) advertising copy writers. Advertising seems to have its own rules of grammar, and it's nigh unto impossible to save copy writers from their own cleverness sometimes. And punctuation? Merely decorative.

When I was still working for the legal publishers, there was a cartoon in The New Yorker that I cannot now find (and why is that?  Why is it that the things I think are funny or the paintings I like never seem to be popular enough to reproduce? What do you mean, weird? What are you saying, here? Huh?) that showed a gang of people with red pens marauding across the city correcting the spelling, grammar, and punctuation of various public documents. The caption was "Rogue Copy Editors."

Here's the next best thing, thanks to Sylvia:

And there's no apostrophe in "ours," dammit. Ever.

Online Book Fair! Nov. 14-16

Tis the season. And here's the first (at least for readers): The Second Annual Online Book fair.

Here's what you get at Love of Reading.com from 10 AM to 8 PM EST both days:

4Free raffles—including 3 free books an hour and one large prize giveaway per day

4Ongoing Podcasts and author readings by popular authors such as Alan Alda, Kim Edwards and Pulitzer Prize Winner Rick Atkinson.

4Guest bloggers and reviewers will blog at the fair

4Forum and discussion groups

4Reader’s Choice Award for favorite book jacket. Last year’s winner was the mega bestseller, The Thirteenth Tale.

4Roundtable discussions with topics including How to Get Your Book Published

One Piece of Paper to Make Them All

Two of my major obsessions collide again on the Internets: paper arts and fandom. Somehow, all those action figures pale in comparison to the origami pieces constructed by people like Eric Joisel, a French origami artist and, apparently, a fan of Lord of the Rings. His origami figures look unlike any others I've seen, and are far beyond the level of simple cranes. Have a look. Then visit his site for a collection that's truly stunning, as well as process shots.

Ready for the New Class

I signed up for the Coptic stitch class at the Center for Book Arts last week and was absurdly chuffed today when I got the class email with the list of materials to bring:

Your instructor (it said), Susan Mills, has requested that you bring the following items to class:

• Bone folder (I have one of these! Two even!  One's teflon!)
• X-acto knife or scalpel with extra blades (Oooo, I have lots of these; very sharp)
• Adhesive brushes (Just bought a couple of these! )
• Bookbinding awl (Could use a better one, but still . . . )
• microspatula--recommended (*buffing my nails* yup, got that too)
• Cutting mat, if you have one (do I have one? Large or small? Clear or green?)
• Plastic container for holding glue (Yup, big ol' plastic jar.)
• Scissors (But of course! More sharp things to cut myself with.)
• Metal straight edge--about 18" long (pwnd for years)
• 90 degree square or triangle (had one since high school; now own three, one XL)
• Pencil (goes without saying)
• Any decorative papers you may want to use--optional (I mean, really. Need you ask? I can even share!)

Dude, I am so ready for this class. Of course, it does involve sewing. And cutting things. Neither of which I excel at, and both of which I've been known to injure or poke myself doing.

I think I'll bring bandaids, too.

New Book Arts Exhibit at Parsons

From Words & Pictures, the Parsons Illustration Department Blog, an exhibition I'll definitely be checking out. (Click for a larger image.)

Transitions

I've had my friend Helen over for a week, while she's busy buying an apartment here, so I'm just now getting the new workspace put together. The Ikea counter came right before Helen arrived, and I got it put together last Monday by a nice guy whose services I highly recommend, Adam at Furniture Assembly Service. He's prompt, competent, and relatively inexpensive. Good, fast, and cheap(ish) all in one. How rare. I'm so glad I didn't try putting this one together myself. There's no way I could have wrestled it, for one thing, and for another, several of the holes had to be drilled out and that would have pissed me off royally. As it was, it was a no-muss, no-fuss assembly that cost me $90 and was well worth every penny.

It's taken me a couple of days to get my tools and supplies sorted out and stored. Right now, I can't find anything and I'm sure I'll move it around a bit in the coming weeks, but it's really nice to have all my stuff in one place, and not all in little boxes, though I still have some of those. They're now conveniently stored under the new counter. Still a few things to buy to make it all come together. It's surprising how efficiently designed that computer desk was. But the new printer, for which I had to buy a USB cord, is a monster and takes up too much room for the old cart. Helen's going to take the old cart off my hands when she moves into her new place, since she'll need one. I still have to buy some shelving for books, which have all been displaced, and to get a bit of the clutter off my new desk (my old kitchen table); some kind of small storage to stash my cut bookboard in and maybe put my book press on top of, to get it off the new, shorter counter; and some kind of cord control system. It looks like a mass of snakes under my table now, and it's ridiculous. But no wonder: I've got two printers, a scanner, an external hard drive, my PDA, and another USB hub all plugged in down there. Not to mention two lamps, a shredder and the power cord for my speakers.

But at least it's shaping up now, even if I had to buy a few extra bits to make it work. On order still is a keyboard table, since the old table's too high to type on. Right now, I'm working off my lap desk, propped against one of the drawer pulls and my chair arms. It's the perfect distance and a good work surface, but a temporary solution, at best. I don't want to wreck the drawer pull. Besides, you can never have too much work surface, and that's grown rather a lot now, thank goodness.

And when it's all sorted out, on to making the body is. . . . In the meanwhile, I seem to have developed a pretty nasty cold; either that, or the new counter is off-gassing some sort of nasty chemical (I think it might actually be the latter, from the composite board drawer fronts). I'll post pics when everything's all together. 

Will the Vampire People Please Leave te Lobby? Part I

Woot!  My friend Allyson's new book, Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby? about her adventures in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" fandom, was the subject of the big Sunday Unshelved this week. Nothing like a little free publicity. In case you missed it, here it is. I'll be reviewing it shortly too, when I catch up on all the other unimportant crap I have to do, like earn a living. In the meanwhile, enjoy! Oh yeah, and buy one!

Hot off the Press: Espresso Books

I've been meaning to write about this ever since I got one, but other things intervened. I happened to be in the area of the NYPL Science and Business Library one day a while back while the Espresso Book Machine (from On Demand Books) was still in residence, and stopped in to get myself a copy of Edward Abbot's Flatland (copyright free text here).

The Internet Archive has scanned the text of the 1884 edition from the University of Toronto for Microshaft, er, Microsoft, or at least it so appears from the rights paragraph. It's a little confusing, so I'll let you intrepret it:

Digitized for Microsoft Corporation byt he Internet Archive in 2007. From the University of Toronto. May be used for non-commercial, personal, research, or educational purposes, or any fair use. May not be indexed in a commercial service.

Apparently, you can used the text itself, which has fallen out of copyright, but not this particular scanned image. Is copyright getting more insane, or is it just me?

The book itself is, well, perfectly serviceable for what it is: nicer than a paperback, not quite as nice as a trade edition, of which it's about the same size. My biggest complaint is the paper, which is just copier paper, and not particularly nice copy paper. It's a bright enough white, but the texture leaves something to be desired. That's probably just me being picky, though. In the future, I hope they'll be using acid-free paper to combat the problem of deteriorating books. Just having them in an on-line archive is not enough. (Why? Two words: electromagnetic pulses. Good-bye accumulated knowledge of mankind, the equivalent of the burning of the original Library of Alexandria.) The covers are nice and heavy and a coated matte finish. How long the whole thing lasts is still up in the air; I'll keep you posted. The look of the book inside, of course, depends on the quality of the digitization, which was okay, but not perfect. You get a sense of the original's wear and tear without the actual thing, and with older books, the benefit of some nice hand-typesetting with beautiful type. The Digitized by Microsoft ® watermark on the bottom of every page sort of spoils that, though.

The reason for using copier paper is that this is mostly what the Espresso Book Machine is: two copiers in tandem, one a heavy-duty duplex B&W for the text, the other a heavy-duty duplexing color copier for the covers. In between is a mini-production line that fans, cuts, collates, sands the binding edge, applies glue and attaches the cover, then delivers the whole package to another trimmer—and this is where it fell apart.

My cover is a little mangled because the final trimmer, I suspect, was showing some wear and tear and the delivery system was not quite accurate enough to get the book block and cover positioned quite right. The guy who was operating it popped the book out with minimal damaged and I took it home and finished trimming the cover with an Xacto. This is was version 1.5 of the machine, and there are still some bugs to work out, obviously, but all in all, I think it's a very successful experiment.

If you'd like to see the specs, there's a PDF of the information sheet I picked up, here.