Subsections below:
The groups and layers
Compositors (layout workers)
Proofreaders in the studio
Production editors who did hands-on corrections
More content-editing and writing sorts there
Mike’s learning curve
on getting there
A purging of an
executive flashes like lightning
Appendix: [on a 2008
event; not ready yet]
[As I said in Part 6, the set of textbooks I’ve been
discussing had the banner title, “Prentice Hall Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless
Themes.” See Part 4 for a set of links to
earlier parts. Edits 6/11/15. Edit 7/5/15. Edit 7/24/15.]
Given what I said in Part 6—and I haven’t even described
situations (among a variety of work venues, not just PH) where teachers were
actually in editor’s seats, showing (not that they fully realized this) they
weren’t tooled to practical editors’ work—I turn now to a description of the
different levels of editors’ work on the PH School lit project, which
ultimately will lead to how Mike (competent and earnest enough) fit in when he
arrived.
The groups and layers
Compositors (layout workers). There were many “compositors” (as
I said in Part 4). They were far more art-oriented than any editors; the
ambition of at least one of them, for instance, was to go out west and do
titles for movies in Hollywood.
These workers were, I thought, treated by PH like princes and princesses. (The
head of the studio—I think her name was AnnMarie Roselli—who had a
little support staff, was a very reasonable, professional, approachable sort.)
The compositors—most were in their twenties, I’d say—had
work stations in rather nice little rooms, with two or three or more to a room,
with low lighting, decorations of their choice there. There was a sort of “mellow”
college-y flavor to their setup, and some rooms of them were “cooler” than
others (I say this without irony).
(If this project was happening today, assuming the same
technology, probably a not-tiny number of the compositors would have body
piercings and/or tattoos [so might some of the staff managers, for that
matter].)
Compositors, despite their “art star” nature as I’ve just suggested,
basically did layouts following strict guidelines from above (mainly, staffers
on the floor above) [update 6/11/15: actually, there was a design department, art-related rather than editorial, that was on the same floor as the studio; I'll say more on it in Part 8]. They also did corrections to subsequent iterations of what
they’d laid out, once editors and others had marked corrections and such on the
layouts.
As for our location, we few proofreaders, unlike the
compositors, worked in a number of ad hoc places—we were moved around as, for
instance, our current space was needed to set up work stations for more
compositors. So for a time we worked at little cubicles not far from the
compositors…. At some point, Penny and Rebecca came (for a long term) to share
a big, round table in their own room (on the level of the studio, I believe,
which was on the ground floor at the back of the big PH building in Upper
Saddle River), but their location was rather removed from where the compositors
were more rigorously arrayed.
Meanwhile, over time I was in a few different locations,
ending up (for my last months there, I think) in an unused little office on the
floor above the one on which the studio was. Both Mike and I ended up on that
level, I think.
If you wondered why I went to such length in Part 4 to
describe this project from a “book packager” perspective—and also have made an
insinuation (in the same part) to Viacom’s ownership of PH as having some
possible effect on textbook content—one piquant example of the type of concerns
we in the studio had has stuck in my mind (though I know there was tons of
issues that flowed by in the waterfall of work). It’s a little hard to pin down
exactly the influence in marketing-related ways within textbooks on the part of
Viacom, which was PH’s corporate owner at the time (Viacom owned [along with owning
Paramount Studios] Simon & Schuster, the trade publisher, which latter was
combined in some way with Prentice Hall in order [not necessarily a conscious
or slant-producing aim] for Prentice Hall to seem like a subsidiary of S&S;
and then when the British company Pearson was buying PH and other properties,
PH’s being disunited from S&S made some staffers in the company a little
regretful, as if it was losing a really “cool” cachet—as if there was no longer
a chance for Carly Simon to come by in big sunglasses and stylish summer wear
[I’m joking with this last detail]).
The HS literature textbooks, which (no shock) went to
lengths to appeal to kids with such features as color and allusions to more
pop-culture details anyway, had references to famous movies (and they weren’t
necessarily properties of Paramount/Viacom). The movie presence in the books
wasn’t so meretricious that you felt the books were a slovenly way for a
film-studio-related corporation to hawk schoolbooks, but it certainly went
beyond what I remembered of textbooks of just a couple decades before.
Anyway, the tasty detail: there was a two-page layout—I
don’t remember in relation to what seriously-handled literature item at hand—that
had a big picture of a scene from the first Star
Wars film (i.e., what is now referred to, with the rest of its title, as Episode IV). The picture included Carrie
Fisher and Mark Hamill’s characters, I believe; but also, there in his ugly,
pile-of-whatsit glory was Jabba the Hut. I thought that, among such pop-culture
pictures in the book, this was a little chintzier and more pandering than most.
And an issue came up where the layout had to be taken and refitted with a
better version of the picture because, color-wise, it looked too X, Y, or
whatever. At least one concern involved Jabba’s color.
Now, you know I’m a film fan, but films are one cultural
thing; pedagogy regarding literature for growing students is another. Anyway, the
issue with this photo, it seemed at the time to me, was petty, regarding a
relatively shlocky film. And there seemed a little more concern (inordinately
so) over that picture than about some more serious, editorially related point you might have seen, if not on that layout, with others. But that was
part and parcel of what the project was like, on a conceptual level as well as
regarding everyday business.
Proofreaders in the studio. We proofreaders, at least through
October, were mainly to check that errors, changes, or additions that were marked
by numerous people (some by various levels of staffers, and some by us) on an
older iteration of a page layout, were incorporated (by the compositors in “correcting”
mode) in a new layout.
Of course, there was a very fancy, particular set of style
rules for laying out pages that was floated to the studio from “on high” (and
partly designed by staffers within the studio itself); this was to be followed
by compositors in their laying out, as well as proofreaders in our reading of
laid-out pages. A lot of this surrounded layout (graphics-related) concerns,
and hence there were templates, or sample layouts to be followed. These aimed
to govern every detail, including colors of type, typeface style and size for
certain subheads, etc. There basically was no room here for creative
variation—which, at large, has its positive sides in publishing situations.
As a matter of practice, compositors were variously skilled
in how they made changes (as they generally weren’t editors). Not all knew
proofreading marks when they came to PH, and had to learn them (to some extent)
once they got there (there was a sheet listing marks that was shared with
various; I don’t know if it was made in-house or some general item gotten from
outside). (You can refer in Part 5 to when I spoke about proofreading marks.)
Also, some compositors in doing corrections seemed to rather routinely skip
markings by certain people or in certain colors of ink (there were multiple
colors). (I’ve seen this tendency in other work situations, too.)
And sometimes a compositor made a correction in the wrong
place in the text, which it was up to us proofreaders to find; this was an
understandable enough error that is also typical of workers whose forte was
textual reading. (If you’re starting to wonder why the compositors were treated
like stars relative to us proofreaders, that’s a good question I don’t have an
answer to.)
There was one story where one of us editors had made an
instruction to insert an m-dash somewhere. The proofreading symbol for this
looks like a fraction, like a 1 over a lower-case m. Well, a compositor—as
Penny (or Rebecca) told the story—actually tried to insert onto the page, via
some text controls of some sort (in Quark), a fraction that looked like 1 over
m. (This, of course, was corrected.)
Errors aside, and given the different personalities, (1) the
compositors’ handling their ton of work and (2) we proofreaders’ checking the
work, and (3) our returning clumps of items clipped together for a given page
(or little-section) layout—all worked in a fairly clockwork fashion, with all
of us cooperating amenably enough.
(In fact, I’m amazed to recall how well the big group of us
got on, which was quite different from the sophomoric and sometimes abusive
stuff I would see in the medical-promo realm after about 2006.)
Production editors who did hands-on corrections. There was the
Production Editing department, which was in the same office area (on the same
floor) as the studio, and which had both staffers and temps. This was where staff
manager Christina B. held court, and this department will become relevant
toward the end (in a future entry) of my PH story. They did more of what you
would expect low-level editors to do, and their work was categorized as copy editing there (the type of work,
regarding books, I wanted to get more opportunities in), making changes to
conform with certain verbal rules,
whether general types or project-specific ones, or simple rewording of something
in order to have words fit on a page (a very pragmatic sort of move) or
otherwise meet some not-so-art-related requirement.
The copy editors in this department I remember are Betsy
Torjussen (more on her just below), Debbie McC. [am I right
on name?], Claudia D., and Betsy Bostwick. The first Betsy was a staffer;
Debbie and Claudia were, I believe, freelancers; and I’m not sure about the
status of Betsy Bostwick.
Betsy Torjussen was a senior copy editor (and a staffer) in this department, and she was an elderly (maybe 60),
teacherly sort (I don’t know if she had ever actually worked as a teacher; I
think she had). She was usually amenable enough to work with. She didn’t get on
an academic high horse, or act stuffy; she was very practical, as the situation
demanded (in fact, this showed how much unlike
a traditional teacher she could be in a publishing situation); and meanwhile,
she could voice understandable exasperation at the volume of work as did the
rest of us, sanely.
Among the more-junior editors in this department was Debbie
McC. (or O’C.; I could check this in my records [update 7/24/15: Her surname was O'Connell; more info on her is in Part 10 subpart A]), who was a young woman (age about
27?) who (in my view) was a little stiff in attitude but nice enough generally.
She was freelance, I believe (and all the freelance copy editors on this project, if I’m not mistaken, were not there through a temp agency.) I
think Debbie was also (outside PH, of course) a part-owner of a restaurant; arguably
in some kind of line with this, she struck me as a little snobbish (she was
definitely on the smug side—cordial but a bit remote and stiff).
(Interestingly, one of the higher-level staff editors at PH
School—who was some kind of content-related editor, maybe an “ac ed” or
whatever slang was used for “acquisition editor” [clarification 6/11/15: the nature of these editors, not quite conveyed rightly here, will be discussed in Part 8]—remarked in passing that a
certain tedious kind of editing, such as revolved around “key words,” was a
“Debbie [McC.] kind of editing,” or something close to this. In part this
showed how un-technical-details-oriented such “ac eds” could be. But also, I
thought something like, “So, even the very Bergen County–ish Debbie McC. could
be regarded with some bit of irony [from another presumably Bergen County
denizen], even though Debbie isn’t extravagant, tediously pedantic, or nerdish
in her work role.” More as an aside, I found it interesting how some females
didn’t bond or mutually respect each other, whom you might think would, at PH; another example is, when I
was back there in spring 1998, I found that Amy Capetta, a new freelance
proofreader of about 23 at the time, and Frances T., a compositor/supervisor [age
maybe 25] who was there as a long-term temp [with whom I’d gotten along well],
didn’t seem to interact as if they would have any sort of mutual work-related interest.
This is an area worth pondering, and subject to subtlety, far more than I can
do here.)
More generally, notwithstanding this little joking instance
regarding Debbie, there was something a little “uppity” about the more-junior production
editors (even when some of them were freelance), compared to us studio
proofreaders, who by comparison were the more “earthy,” pragmatic/hustling, feet-on-ground
sorts, and by whatever train of reasoning in the studio were (I think) more
warmly embraced by the culture of compositors there.
(Another more-junior copy editor, also a freelancer I think,
was Claudia D., who was a bit of a dry personality [and seemed to be in her
thirties, at least], but I also recall her as being a little more approachable
than Debbie. I think the reason for these editors’ aloof nature was that a lot
was being expected of the few of them, regarding niggling textual issues, in a
way that was different from what was expected of us more “visually oriented”
proofreaders. [Probably more can be said about the likely reasons.])
Rounding out the Production Editing hands-on group was Betsy
Bostwick, whom I remembered in a certain particular way enough to almost
comment about her (in an abstractly comparing way) in part of an entry on Jason
Aronson Publishers that I did in winter 2014, but cut out at the last moment.
Betsy, I think, had a copy editing role in the literature project more tailored
to the teachers’ editions of the textbooks, so it makes sense I hold off on her
until I start talking more about Mike in a future entry. (If you think I have a
grump-fest in mind regarding her, don’t be so sure: I am reusing an old folder
in my briefcase that I had used for PH work stuff in 1997-98, and in it is an
old Post-it from Betsy reading “Merry Christmas!”)
More content-editing and writing sorts there. What “editorial visionary
brains” were in the PH School division comprised almost entirely staffers, who
were located on a floor one flight above the studio’s level. Actual generation
of new copy (not minor rewordings, as a copy editor would do) came from them—and
of course, all the designing of the books came from their direction along with,
presumably, other staffers. Such designing was formulated at the highest
managerial level according to marketing concerns as well as, I believe, some
kind of “council” relationship with some academic people or entities outside PH. [Update 6/11/15: More will be said on this in Part 8.] [All this description is done partly on fuzzy memory and partly on reasonable
inference and presumption.] (In fact, I remember being surprised, hearing from
proofreader Rebecca I think, that a lot of the content-designing that went on
was done under the rubric of “marketing”: imagine if your local schools’
curricula were designed under a “marketing” agenda.)
On the other hand, a lot within these HS lit books—which
were vaunted in the promotional stuff for the “Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes”
set of books as newly designed—was “pick-up,”
or material transferred from a previous edition, from the last edition of this
series of books (basically, this “pick-up” was most of the esteemed literature
that was represented). Meanwhile, what verbiage was new was mostly student
questions, and explanatory, pedagogical text of sorts. (You can now see why I
invoked a “book packaging” concept in Part 4 in talking about the details of
this production process.)
The staff editors at PH School were in the most corporate
sort of relationship and work structure there (unlike the studio, which was
more ad hoc and tailored to the practical needs of this project). Among staff
editors there was one junior editor assigned to each grade level, and these
editors were usually youngish people (pretty approachable). Then there were
more senior-level, managerial editors. Anyway, it was staff editors who wrote
new copy, and could be consulted with (including by us proofreaders) on certain
problems. They were generally receptive to our consultations.
##
So you see, even though some of us were temps brought in
just for this project, we all functioned as a sort of family working on this
project. Which made it all the more a kick in the tail when some of us temps
were let go from the project in winter 1998. (I was reminded recently that my
time there ended at the very end of January 1998.)
Mike’s learning curve
on getting there
When Mike finally was brought in in (I believe) early October
1997 [correction 7/5/15: I found that Mike didn't arrive until very early December 1997; this to be detailed in series Part 10], he not only had the unenviable task of getting up to speed on what was
needed on this massive, ever-flowing project, but he didn’t realize that we
proofreaders occupied a certain narrow area of responsibility in this process.
Then, when we already-there proofreaders started doing “copy editing” to
teacher’s edition (TE) material in about October, we were adding a new
dimension to our work that was fairly easy for us to adopt, with our having
been boned up on the characteristics of the series by our lower-level tasks for
months beforehand.
Thus, as memory serves and as seems reasonable to infer, Mike
was coming in meant to do only (or primarily) “copy editing,” as it was
conceived, to the TE copy—which generally allowed for all of us to give more
judgmental input, particularly as it was handled by the higher-ups in a fairly
flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pants way anyway. Here, as it happened, there were
still art-related concerns for us to heed, such as layout structure, propriety
of certain colors and subheads, and so on. We had templates for this. So Mike—who
would turn out to be a pretty verbally oriented academic—had to adjust to the
art-related aspect, too.
Naturally, Mike was “put upon” to square with the need to
keep up with purely conceived, honestly-faced reading/editorial-changes aspects as well as the art-related aspects, and this made him a
little behind the curve in understanding. Also, it left him
quite-understandably vexed (if in a good-humored-tinged way) with the demands,
quirks of the project, etc. So if his personality came out as rather
disagreeable in some ways as we all worked, he couldn’t really be blamed.
But his ways of expressing himself did create some
“blow-back” among workers outside the proofreader circle where, I think at
times, some staff editors (on reading our comments written on layouts) thought
his semi-sarcastic comments were coming from me and not from him,
which Mike’s and my distinct styles of handwriting alone should have shown wasn’t true. But that goes to show how some
staff editors could have not the best
judgment here, and anyway the rapid, hustling nature of the project in its last
months might have made bad or hasty assessments of us inevitable. (I wondered
if Mike’s voiced attitude is what led to my being dropped—along with him—in
January 1998, even as aspects of the PH lit project went on afterward. This
though I’d also find, at other types of media places, that droppings of sets of
editors, completely in disregard for their respective ways of working, was not
terribly rare, especially with temps.) (And this doesn’t have to do with
Christina B., either. Her role regarding me would be in later 1998.)
##
Anyway, if there’s one thing common to large
corporations—and other examples in this series will make this clear—the whole
structure of them, with their large amounts of people (of different levels of
talent and intelligence), and the overriding concern of transmission of power,
do not conduce to every craft-level worker’s being valued for just what he or
she brought to a given project, and what profitable use might be made of that
worker at the same company in the future. This held even if anyone with any
sense should have inferred the person’s value from, if nothing else, the volume of work the person handled and
the competence that he or she had to have been exhibited (or else the
person would have been jettisoned, like the bloke who was kicked up to sales
before I ever got there).
From another angle: Big corporations that get involved in
what has often been handled in a “cottage industry” way—like the fashioning of
books, which involves a specially skilled, labor-intensive type of craftwork
(from the likes of me)—end up maximizing their corporate imperatives, which can
mean flouting the interests (in more work) of the craft worker, while the
corporation marches on contentedly (if a bit robot-like) to its steady future.
(Doug McCollum, who was lauded as the executive editor for
the PH HS lit project, was not a
genius of an editor. For one thing, he spelled aid—as in help (to
students)—as aide. Routinely.)
##
A purging of an
executive flashes like lightning
One big aspect of this project should be consistent with all
I’ve said, but I’ve held off on it: Why was PH doing this project in-house (with the studio “cast of
thousands”), when apparently it used to typically do this (as Penny told me)
with outside vendors (and apparently has preferred to use outside vendors in
subsequent years)? I don’t know, but when the issue of PH’s being sold to
Pearson hung in the air in 1998, that ongoing business created some weird
concerns on the upper echelons that we footsoldiers only got piecemeal and
vague indications of.
For instance, despite the voluminous, frenetic work on the
PH HS lit project, all the sudden it was decided (in fall 1997) that the woman
at the very top of PH School had to be jettisoned, and she was. And a new
person took her place, another female, whose first name (nickname) was Marty, I
think. The reason the previous executive was ousted was that our project had
failed to meet some key deadline or two. (Meanwhile, there was never any flavor
I got [from coworkers at large] about this executive than that she was lauded,
liked, or whatever.)
Well, we on the ground level hardly knew about this failing
to meet a deadline. All we knew with what we were doing was what work passed
through our hands and how management seemed to impinge on us, which was generally
a cordial enough “Do what you can to get it done.” So then, as we continued our
work while the new executive was in place, the work on our grassroots level
didn’t change. The lack of procedural
change was almost hugely resounding. After all, we were hustling as fast as we
could anyway. (I seem to recall there might have been tiny changes in what we
did, but nothing super-appreciable.)
(In any event, the phenomenon of a publishing company’s “addressing”
into a near-term failing by firing someone “high up” is rather like a banana republic’s
purging a mustachioed functionary, as if to appease the gods, without any other,
larger change in government functioning—because the execution seems more for
symbolic reasons than for practical. This is a whole other area to discuss
elsewhere.)
In about late November or so, especially odd in view of the
purge of the top executive of PH School, there was a little get-together of us
underworkers in a lobby, held by some relatively mid-level manager, to
celebrate how we low-level peons were doing. Champagne was passed out; some
clerical type virtually shoved a glass of the “bubbly” into my hand. I drank
it. (The “pep-rally” type event was almost to reassure us despite how the
purging of the upper executive may have appeared.)
The Champagne
ended up making me a little shaky for proofreading, but in a way that was a
nice little gesture from management to us underlings. So you see, despite the
excesses of a huge-corporate project, there were also some charms and wonders
to the whole thing.
##
This experience, without stretching too much, I think is
like the way some actors who were in the film Apocalypse Now characterized their experience over the years. In
the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness,
various actors (Frederic Forrest, Sam Bottoms) voiced resentment and the like
at director Francis Ford Coppola for excesses, big and small. But by the 2006
DVD, which includes new interviews with the actors, the same actors seem to
recall the experience with more gratitude and forgiveness, if not unadulterated
fondness.
The 1997-98 PH project was rather like that. It was a big
monster in terms of number of people, and management challenges. There are some
aspects of it I feel a bit angry about, in reviewing the old experience. But in
other ways I am pleasantly surprised at how, all flaws of the experience aside,
there was a lot of positive here, almost despite the unwieldy conditions there.
The fact that I got good gigs at other firms shortly afterward may help explain
this forgiveness, but I think the real root of it is that the experience really
was of a group of people working together, with relatively rare instances of
managerial bitchery (and this word is deliberate: such at publishing companies
usually comes from females).
Even when we get to how Christina B. ended my time at PH
School in June 1998, I can definitely say she was a witch in how she did it; but
on the other hand, there were some behaviors you would never see at PH. For instance, no one at PH but a psychopath, no
matter how long the person (typically a female) had been working as a manager,
would think it wise in any
sense—never mind the legal actionability of it—to broadcast via the company
intranet some insinuation about how a freelance editor comported himself (in
some relatively or presumed “taboo” way) with a female worker, with the net
result that the editor couldn’t possibly see how he could work there again.
To be continued.
