At Cottonwood Press, we are all madly proofreading two books that are going to the printer this week. I am a good proofreader, and so are my staff members. We will spend hours and hours and hours checking and rechecking every page.
And yet I am absolutely certain there will be at least a couple of errors in each book. I have learned over the years that it is virtually impossible to produce nearly anything without some kind of goof slipping through. It's not that we aren't careful. We are. But the fact is that when you are so close to something you are trying to finish, you don't see what you need to see. Come back to it a couple of months later, and mistakes you missed earlier will jump out at you.
I used to feel terrible about this, but I have since learned that all publishers, even large ones, have difficulty achieving perfection. (My staff has been pointing out errors every week in Publisher's Weekly, for example.) Then someone pointed out this paragraph from Opportunities in Book Publishing (National Textbook Company, 1980):
...The copyeditor is necessary because these errors are inevitable. No writer, however thorough his research or his perfectionist approach to his work, can avoid making errors in the course of hundreds of pages....When President Eisenhower was working on Crusade in Europe, his account of World War II, he insisted at the beginning that there would be no errors in his book. To that end, the manuscript was not only copyedited with the most meticulous care, but it was read by six other people and the General himself, all of them specialists. Yet there was an error in the first sentence on the first page, which everyone had missed.
That paragraph makes me feel so much better. The only problem is the words "hundreds of pages." Sometimes errors occur when we are proofreading far less than hundreds of pages.The worst goof we ever made was producing a bumper sticker that said, "My main squeeze is an accordionist." Only we put three "c's" in "accordionist, in three-inch high letters. The most amazing part is that we sold the bumper sticker for a year or more before anyone, including us, noticed.
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