Why is it that newspapers are better edited than books?
No, seriously. As a reviewer, I’m constantly startled by the typos, misspellings, grammatical anomalies and downright factual errors that creep into books – the kind of errors that would get most newspaper copy editors, at least on the better newspapers, beaten about the head and ears with their stylebooks. (Or would have before newspapers started laying off their copy editors.)
Now, I read most of the books I review in bound galley form, usually marked with caveats like “Do not quote for publication before checking final bound edition.” But when I do check, I often find that the errors I’ve circled haven’t been corrected. Sometimes I even e-mail the errors I’ve found to the publishers.
As an example of what I’m talking about, take the review of Artists in Exile from the Houston Chronicle below. I was delighted to see that in the printed version, some editor had taken the trouble to add an umlaut to the name of Max Ophuls – i.e., Ophüls. The truth is, I had omitted the umlaut because Ophuls himself dropped it while he was working in
Now, look at the book itself. In it, the author refers to the character “Professor Unraut” in the film “Das blaue Engel.” More than once. In fact, the film is Der blaue Engel, which was based on the Henrich Mann novel Professor Unrat. The character’s name in the film is Prof. Immanuel Rath, a teacher whose pupils call him “Prof. Unrat” – in German, Unrat means “trash.” As far as I can tell, there’s no such word as “Unraut” in German.
In the first draft of my review, I pointed out these errors, but I decided that they were picayune. It’s an excellent book, and although the mistakes bothered me, they detract in only minor ways from its excellence. But when you see mistakes in a book that you catch easily, you wonder if there are mistakes that you didn’t catch.
Anyway, an eagle-eyed newspaper copy editor noted that Ophuls was missing his umlaut. Which only makes me wonder if books are subjected to less stringent editing.
1 comment:
I think the first major error I spotted in a novel was in one of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels when I was a kid. The book had Teddy Carella (if I remember her name correctly) listening to some washing machines when she was, in fact, deaf.
I suspect that these days fewer publishers cough up the dough to hire good editors ... or any editors.
I don't have time to dig up the cites at the moment, but I have read that many authors either have to find and hire their own editors these days or do without.
Even at some of the larger publishers.
John Steinbeck would have been in big trouble! The dude couldn't spell, neither could Gerald Durrell, at least during part of his career.
But both were fine writers all the same.
- John Orr
Post a Comment