Rebecca Lee has worked for 20 years in the editorial department of world-renowned publishing house Penguin, and has parlayed her experience as well as that of multiple interviewees into How Words Get Good – a book about how books are made. A neat, if mildly navel-gazing, premise, and one that appears pitched at curious outsiders rather than those in the biz, taking the reader through the nuts and bolts of commissioning, copyediting, indexes, typography and the myriad quirks of spelling, grammar, punctuation and translation.
There’s plenty of historical context thrown in, with Lee making liberal use of counterculturalist Marshall McLuhan’s term “Gutenberg Galaxy” – referring to the possibilities that opened up when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the mid-1400s. Some of the handed-down anecdotes about disastrous typos, dodgy translations and the like you may have even encountered before, but I’d wager that most readers of How Words Get Good will learn a few things, and be taught them in a cheerful, clearheaded tone too.
Lee notes, in passing, the gift/curse of the proofreader to be forever seeking out minor errors in blocks of written text – I can testify that it’s assuredly a thing. She also acknowledges that some will inevitably feature in How Words Get Good. Me, I wouldn’t have coyly asterisked out “sh*t” in the intro only to later write out the more profane opening line to Oxford Comma by Vampire Weekend in full. Petty? Maybe, but someone’s got to do it…
How Words Get Good, Rebecca Lee (Profile)
Price: £14.99. Info: here
words NOEL GARDNER
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