Fatberg

 

I worked in publishing throughout my prime middle age (in the 1980s and 1990s).  When I would meet someone and tell them I worked in publishing they would assume that I was wining and dining authors on a company credit card, or perhaps later holding some of these authors’ hands as I shepherded them through the publishing process. That I would be knee deep in manuscripts by people like Toni Morrison or Philip Roth–or Doris Kearns Goodwin. Or that I was some kind of subject expert who knew other subject experts who wanted to write books (in psychology or economics). That I would always be on the cutting edge of a topic that interested the punditocracy and could hold forth at a cocktail party.  That I might even one day become part of the punditocracy myself.

But no. I worked in Production, I told them.  For people who don’t know much about the publishing business (as it was in the days of print, in any event) it is not all about the authors and the specialty editors. Most of the work that gets done could be going on anywhere else. Most people who work in publishing are not particularly interested in reading or in books (the people in Fulfillment, for example, who spend their days keeping track of names and addresses and generating labels). A publishing company has to run efficiently and most of that falls on the shoulders of Production. A production department at a publisher is the white collar equivalent of a factory (and not all that white collar: when I started out the acquiring editors and marketing managers – who dealt with the public – wore suits; people in Production wore jeans). Or it’s like the infrastructure of one’s bathroom.  Material flows through a pipeline.  “Where in the pipeline are the manuscripts for Volume X Issue Y?” I would be asked.

Like other pipelines, production pipelines could get clogged. The people most likely to clog the production pipeline were perfectionists.  Often these were people who had gone to elite colleges and thought that they were real editors who needed to polish and perfect everything for the third and fourth time even after the company had paid someone to do it the first time. Manuscripts could disappear into the black hole of a perfectionist’s work area for weeks.

          The archetype of this was “Slow Richard”*. Richard was not “slow” in the euphemistic meaning of the word: unintelligent.  He was very intelligent and had gone to an elite college.  When I say he was slow what I mean was he belabored everything. Every word, every punctuation mark.  No matter how many eyes had gone before, Richard couldn’t skip anything. There was one year when, by October (the do or die month for material that had to be published in the calendar year), an enormous “fatberg” of manuscripts, over a foot high, was piled up in Richard’s in-box.

          Anyone who had worked in the department for a while knew that the problem with Richard wasn’t Richard, it was Dorothy, the woman who had trained Richard (most of the rest of us had been trained by our current boss).  Dorothy was much older than most of us and had been a real research biologist.  Why she finally changed fields after 20 years is a mystery, but apparently she got a job in publishing after having written a book (about the research she was doing). She knew a lot of the authors and journal editors we worked with and talked shop with them, so as a “perk” our boss let her go to various society meetings during the year.  Often these were in Europe.  Dorothy humblebragged endlessly about how onerous it was to have to go to, say, Leipzig, and make a speech, for which she also had to buy a new dress because the society members had all seen the one she wore last year – in Paris.  Of course we were all envious, but we also secretly laughed because Dorothy was the only person who didn’t realize that (when she was in the office, at least) what she had was simply a glorified clerical job.  Handling the actual meat of these publications was the purview of the subject editor’s office, not the production department. Nonetheless Dorothy read every word of every copyedited manuscript that crossed her desk and taught Richard to do the same thing. The problem was that Dorothy understood what the articles were about, so she could read them as quickly as most people could read a newspaper.  Richard did not, so it was heavy slogging. (Which is why the rest of us never did more than scan our manuscripts, assuming that the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, the peer reviewers, and the copy editor had done enough.)

Richard was no longer working for Dorothy at the time I am referring to (and for what it’s worth she couldn’t keep an assistant for very long; there had been four since Richard and that covered a period of only 5 years.) But even though Richard was no longer working for Dorothy, he had been permanently scared by her into thinking that if he didn’t read every word of every manuscript at every stage of the production process, someone might die if one of the drugs mentioned in the article was given at the wrong dose (due to a typo) or someone’s research grant might be scrapped if an obscure scientific term was misspelled. Of course these things would be a tragedy, but most of us comforted ourselves knowing that somewhere in the “Instructions to Authors” that appeared in the back of every journal issue there was a statement saying “errors are the responsibility of the author.”

          And anyhow, to everyone else in the department, errors great and small paled in comparison to the bottom line; i.e., making sure that the company could book the revenue for all those December issues that had to mail out of the warehouse before December 20. A frequent saying around the office was “Don’t look too hard for mistakes. The journal has to be published in December; if there’s a mistake you can publish an erratum in January.”

          The year that the fatberg of manuscripts was discovered in Richard’s in-box was the last year that working in that office was “fun”. Along with the final issues of at least three of his journals that were not going to make it (an “all hands on deck” approach dealt with most of the fatberg but not all of it), we also discovered some other, equally serious, problems: another production editor had lost an entire issue of manuscripts and had not told anyone, and someone else was on the verge of publishing an article that had been published before (the issue was intercepted after it was printed and had to be recreated from scratch at huge expense) because he had no filing system.

          So everyone in the department, from top to bottom, ended up on the hot seat with the Vice President. As is so often the way, the casual relaxed atmosphere that allowed competent (albeit lazy) people like myself and some others to thrive (ah, those two hour lunches spent shopping at Lord & Taylor!) also prevented people with poor organizational skills from acquiring any. So going forward, there was a strict check-in system up and down the chain of management and people’s tiniest movements were now closely supervised.

          About a year later our company merged with another company and our fun-loving boss (who by that point had been seriously chastened) was gone.  And the following year I left.  

 

[*All names have been changed.]