If you sensed unwonted stress at the end of my previous post, you were right. When I decided at the beginning of January that we would bring out the book in six months, I calculated that as ‘the beginning of June’… So actually five months. That in turn meant that we had just over four months in which to deliver the book to the printers. Mad! If I had known all that it would involve, and the pressures it would put Sam&Sam under, I would never have gone there.
The unforeseen challenges have been the complexities of computer typography. It is well known that the period of reading proofs is the most dangerous one for an author, as s/he is so used to the text by then, so I decided to read the first proofs slowly, at about sixty pages a day, which consequently took ten working days. This did not throw up many textual problems, but it revealed four typographic ones: the familiar phenomenon of ‘orphans and widows’, i.e. solitary one-liners at the bottom or top of a page; unsightly elastication of lines of text; repeated non-alignments of the bottom of pages; ‘collapses’ of certain characters, particularly in italic, onto the following character.
Sam2 ingeniously solved all these hitches, and is going to write a guest post when the saga is over, about how he did it. It is a fantastic achievement, as there are plenty of commercially published hardback biographies in print that display these very faults!
The vital function of the first proofs was to give us an ‘Extent’, i.e. a text length with (we thought) page numbers set in stone, from which I could insert the page numbers into my already constructed alphabetical list of index terms. Alas, sorting out the orphan/widows and the full page justifications led to some repagination. Not only that, in the first chapter we discovered that a large chunk of text had mysteriously slipped into a slightly smaller font size… So for the second proofs the first chapter and all those misaligned pages had to be re-indexed. Then the whole typeset index had to be proofed and read back to me over three hours, with me following in my master copy, which revealed dozens of transcription mistakes on my part and altogether 110 corrections to be made. I think I understand now why you notice small errors of page numbers in many published indexes! Determined to cure this, I have since carried out massive checks on the typeset Index.
But Sam&Sam’s new-found awareness of line elastication, page misalignment and character collapse meant that we noticed more and more of these glitches in the second proofs, which had themselves taken me another ten days to read. We have decided we have to go for a third proof, but this time in the PDF in which the book has to be delivered. Meanwhile, I have paid the printers up front, as one must, and we are locked into delivery by 15 May… Goodness knows what problems the PDF might throw up, so goodness knows whether, after four months at it, we can deliver to the printers by that date. If we do, the printers offer to deliver in Cambridge on 4 June. Little do they know the Calderonian significance of that date.
Altogether, it has got a bit hot in the kitchen and I feel sure it has led to some ‘character collapse’ on my part, too. Oh for the relaxed, unstressable indifference of Edwardian politician Arthur Balfour: ‘Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.’ But at the end of the day, if we don’t meet this deadline, or if big problems emerge when we receive PDF proofs of the book and jacket from the printers (I have paid extra for these, as too much is at stake to risk gremlins at their end, though I have only two days in which to read them), we will still have some time in hand. The anniversary that this biography synchronises with, the 150th of George’s birth, isn’t until 2 December.
These verses are intended as a consolation to Sam & Sam, in the context of their latest (and last?) tribulations.
Widows and orphans used to be
A simple matter; you could see
Them right (some of them, if not all)
Founding a Foundling Hospital,
A Magdalen, Ladies’ retreat,
To save such women from the street.
(In Venice, it’s the Ospidale;
When kids leave, ‘Ave atque vale’).
But now our Sam & Sam have found
Orphans and widows can abound
Just where you least expect them; cut
Off from their kind, and in a rut.
You can’t just shunt them here or there;
You risk Deficiency of Care.
The thing to do is let them go
To some strays’ paradise, limbo
Where unclaimed lines can find a space
Unknown to print (that fall from grace).
The readers of George Calderon
Might just catch them: going…gone.