If you were writing a satirical guide to the deadening jargon of university research assessments, you might well advise your reader: “Words must be conceived thoughtfully and birthed precisely for maximum narrative impact.” But it comes as a surprise to meet that disturbing sentence in Rebecca Lee’s otherwise jolly and friendly guide to everything that must happen behind the scenes before a book is published.
As an editorial manager at Penguin Random House, Lee is someone with long experience in instructing copy-editors, proofreaders, indexers, printers and all the other unsung heroes who, if they do their job well, invisibly make the author’s glory seem effortlessly attained. It doesn’t always go well, though; disarmingly, Lee admits to having been “part of a team that managed to print 20,000 copies of The Importance of Being Ernest”.
It might once have been said to a greenhorn copy-editor that “the writer is your natural enemy” (attributed, possibly wrongly, to an editor at Time magazine), but a good one can save us from all kinds of embarrassment, and not just on the trivial level of grammar or spelling. As one relates to Lee proudly: “I once worked on a novel in which one of the characters was in the midst of a difficult pregnancy and in the end, in a scene of great tension, gave birth prematurely. By this point, from detailed descriptions of the seasons passing, it was possible to work out that the mother had already been pregnant for 18 months.” Riffling through some old index cards with the contact details of freelance copy-editors of yesteryear, Lee unearths some gems: here’s one who will happily work on “biography, crime, travel, politics”, but – this part underlined – “Not too much poetry”. You can hear the weary sigh echo down the ages.
Any bibliophile will find many enjoyable nuggets in the compendium of book chat that follows: from Kurt Vonnegut’s theories about the shapes of stories to the oddest book title of the year prize (2004 winner: Bombproof Your Horse), or Ian Fleming’s productivity tips (write for three hours in the morning and one in the evening, never read over what you wrote yesterday). Lee interviews a host of thoughtful editors, translators, text designers, blurb-composers and other artisans of literary culture, informing us that the collective noun for a group of ghosts (ghostwriters) is, of course, a “fright”, or smartly debunking the supposed romance of the slush pile. “I once looked up the author of a mildly promising slush pile find about French politics,” Lee recalls, “and discovered the author was in prison for strangling his girlfriend.”
The most combative chapter, inevitably, concerns punctuation: here Lee madly advises that “British English” has no need for the serial or Oxford comma, but then authors are notoriously precious about these marks of rhythm. As Mark Twain wrote: “Yesterday Mr. Hall [his publisher] wrote that the printer’s proofreader was improving my punctuation for me, & I telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray.” Other recurring characters include the splendidly grumpy Gertrude Stein: “a comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it”. Meanwhile, I should like to start a campaign to bring back the manicule (a pointing hand with a cuff) as “the seventh footnote indicator, after the pilcrow”.
It remains for me only to express a collegial bafflement with the book’s rhetorical gimmick, which, in defiance of all convention and good sense, insists on always using “words” (as in the title) when it actually means books, or sentences, or prose style, or stories. So, when Lee warns that “bad words are the junk food of the literary world”, she doesn’t mean swearwords but cheap fiction; and when she regretfully explains that sometimes “the words will return to you for pulping”, she means the books, because you literally cannot pulp words.
By the time I read: “The application of ‘sense’ to our words is one of the most vital ways they get good,” I was losing the will to live; once informed that “even Hitler was concerned with getting his words better”, I prayed that the author had fatally Godwinned her own scheme; but it went on, relentlessly, to the end. Perhaps, after all, it is a friendly invitation to each reader to take up the blue pencil for themselves.
• Steven Poole’s A Word for Every Day of the Year is published by Quercus. How Words Get Good: The Story of Making a Book by Rebecca Lee is published by Profile (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
