Blood, Bones & Butter: Where were the editors?

As a former Prune employee, I’ve been looking forward to Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter for an awfully long time. I ran out the first night the book was released, bought two copies and read it immediately. Even though I already knew lots of Hamilton’s backstory, it was compelling, and it was as well written as I’d expected. Which is to say, splendidly written.

But all I could think when I was reading it was:

Where were the goddamn editors?

It’s a complete disgrace that for a book this heavily bankrolled and long anticipated, the publishers could not hire someone to tidy it up the way it deserved. The misspellings, typos, repeated phrases, inconsistent verb tenses–nothing egregious for a writer to produce, but nothing that should make it to print. It all made me so aggravated that about halfway through, I started keeping a list.

This is a book about food. It should not have the following errors:

  • mis en place
  • McDonalds
  • hors d’oevre
  • ouef en cocotte
  • barbeque
  • blanche

That’s just copy editing, and the process should’ve caught motly, Ballanchine, koochy koo and Chang Mai too.

There also should have been editor to say, “Gabrielle, you’ve described two different places in Greece as ‘orange-scented,’ this guy feeds you apples and honey twice, and maybe there’s another word to use besides ‘meandering’ twice in the first two pages.”

Don’t get me wrong: I am not slamming Hamilton. No writer can make her own text perfect. After a surprisingly short time, you just can’t see anything. And the reason “orange-scented” seems like the perfect phrase and comes to mind so easily is because it’s already lodged in your brain from when you wrote it 500 words ago, and then promptly forgot that you had.

This is exactly why there are editors. Unfortunately, the good ones seem to be all retiring, and younger editors appear to be hired for their trend-spotting acumen, and not for caring about the words themselves. And copy editors are often just inexperienced freelancers who don’t yet know they’re being paid crap.

I just proofed my husband’s new book, for free, to spare the fiasco caused by cheap-ass copy editing on his previous one. But his publisher is not Random House, and it’s not sending him on a 19-city publicity tour. A good copy editor can be had for less than the cost of one or two days’ book tour. (For the record, he had excellent in-house editors on both occasions, who really got into the nitty-gritty of his wording. But that still doesn’t produce clean copy.)

I know I sound like a crank, dwelling on this. I have already tacked 35 years on my age, and donned a little crochet sweater, just typing this up. No–the aging started when I began keeping the list of typos.

But, really–I’m not the only one who’s bothered by this. Right? Right? People just don’t mention it because it seems like a diss on the author. But it’s a systemic failure. Chime in and make me feel less cranky, please.

15 comments

  1. Rachel says:

    Well, you won’t be surprised to hear me chime in to agree, being a fellow professional editor and all. These kinds of errors depress me as a casual reader too, though, and it’s hard not to start taking the author a little less seriously as they pile up — even when it’s really not the author’s fault. I’m right there with you in not expecting all good writers to be good grammarians or proofreaders. That’s exactly why you and I do what we do.

  2. Zora says:

    Thanks for the vote of support, Rachel! Any writer would be so lucky to have you on their team!

    Of course I realized later today that just by posting this, I was setting myself up for a karmic payback of epic proportions…

  3. maria says:

    This is the right thing to rant about. It’s truly outrageous and very sad. Books are sort of sacred things and if I were a published author and my book contained those kinds of errors, I would be really embarrassed. Especially when, as you say, so much money had gone into promoting the book.

    Btw, I made a trip to Nixtamal and it was fantastic. I loved that it was filled with people from the neighborhood, most of whom were probably Mexican. I bought a couple of pounds of masa and brought it up to Massachusetts. Corona looks like a city in another country and I hope ICE is staying out of there.

    Thanks for a great recommendation.

  4. Kim says:

    Don’t feel cranky – it’s appalling to me when I see errors like this in books. It takes me right out of what I am reading and I end up being totally distracted by the errors.

  5. Linda says:

    On the Upper East Side, you can’t get a book out of the library, even a brand new novel by Jonathan Franzen, without it being pencil edited (in the margins, discreetly) by my fellow copy editors. I kind of love that. The most marked-up book I have ever checked out of the public library was Laura Hillenbrand’s “Seabiscuit” – a glaring error (or two or more!) on every single page. She deserves better. Publishing houses should treasure their copy editors.

  6. Zora says:

    That is totally cool, Linda! I think I need to start channeling my energies that way!

    Maria, so glad you liked Nixtamal and got your masa fix! (Never occurred to me, but can you freeze it? That would be very handy…) And yeah, Corona is a really special place–such a fantastic mix.

  7. jane says:

    I’ve been a freelance manuscript preparer/copy-editor since 1980. I once collected shocking oversights and errors, but that became a full-time job in itself. My favorite glitch was in a ms. by a #1 bestselling fiction writer (author of dozens of novels, whose name I can’t reveal): “Her eyes filled with tears and rolled down her cheeks.”
    Another ms. for a book published by a major house contained: “the cowboy upholstered his gun.”

  8. HA says:

    I’m gratified to find this post. I’m two-thirds of the way through this otherwise entertaining and well-written book and I have been shocked at the number of errors, but when I hit “Billecarte Salmon” (a delicious rose champagne) last night, I finally choked – ENOUGH (it’s “Billecart-Salmon” for crying out loud – how hard is that to LOOK UP?)! I was ready to go back and compile a list, just for my own satisfaction (and perhaps to complain to the publisher), when I thought I might save time if I Googled “typos Gabrielle Hamilton”… and voila, here’s your post. It really is egregious, there’s no excuse! Thanks –

  9. zora says:

    Agh! That wasn’t even on my list!

    And I do feel slightly proud that this post ranks so high in such a search. (Meanwhile, my husband is saying behind me, “I didn’t realize there were so many people who made lists of mistakes while they read…” Yup.)

  10. HA says:

    oh, oh, and what about…. I totally forgot, it put me over the edge… “exaggerrating”?!!!!!!! or maybe it was “exaggerrated” – I don’t have time to go back and look, but what a stinker!

  11. Zora says:

    Maybe she was speaking pirate? Seriously, that’s one of those things that should be caught with a simple spell-check. I seriously do not understand what happened in the production process to let that through?

  12. Mitch Hellman says:

    The latest editing atrocity is the accidental (and frequently hilarious) non sequitur caused by the auto-complete software installed on soi-disant smartphones.

    • zora says:

      Amen. Here’s hoping people don’t start composing long articles and books on smartphones. (BTW, a friend of mine is writing a novel in which there is plot development around a misunderstood text-message typo.)

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