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Friday, July 17, 2009

The left at last

Woo hoo!  I mailed my galleys back to NYU Press yesterday—and sure enough, caught a typo late last night.  So I tossed and turned all night, dreaming of an eerie copyeditor who appears at my door saying, room for one more....  Did I mention that this will be my first book that includes a Tom Tomorrow cartoon?  And that the cartoon was placed on the wrong page of the galleys?  Fixing that little mistake will probably cost me as much as the reprint free I offered to Mr. Tomorrow.  But at least I have my very own page at the NYUP website, with all the critical book-related information:

Cloth: $29.95
ISBN: 978081479984
Release Date: 11/01/2009
352 pages, 1 illustrations

The 1 illustrations are just great.  Thanks again, Mr. Tomorrow!  And I think 978081479984 is just about my favorite ISBN number ever.  I note with chagrin, however, that I am listed as “Michael F. Berube,” even though I last used my middle initial in 1974, sometime around the night Chicago died and Billy was advised not to be a hero.  On the plus side, the cover is going to be Teh R0XX0r, with no ginormous ghostly looming heads or preternaturally large pieces of chalk.

So now I can finally answer Flavia’s question:  If your book manuscript (or dissertation, or latest research project) were a piece of furniture, what would it be? Mine is a big, creaky old armoire I’ve been stuffing things into for the past five or six years.  Last winter, when I finally finished stuffing things into it, I decided to paint some fire on the side and then hit it with a sledgehammer repeatedly—to make it look mean. 

Also, I edited the index, which was done by a professional indexer who knew what he was doing.  The subject listings and cross-referencings were intense.  I did catch one curious mistake, though:  my discussions of “class-first” leftists in chapter 5 were indexed as discussions of “first-class” leftists.  As you might imagine, I was sorely tempted to go back into the manuscript and change “class-first” to “first-class,” since that would certainly put a fresh spin on the cultural left vs. reformist left debates of 1990s. That Gitlin fellow—he was one first-class leftist, he was.  When I hit the road with Mike Tomasky, lemme tell ya, we always went first class.

Well, since Flavia has the manuscript-as-furniture question covered, my Arbitrary question for this Friday is this: what’s your very favorite typo in a published book or essay?

Posted by Michael on 07/17 at 10:13 AM
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