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.