Proff Reading

What’s wrong with publishers these days? Don’t they employ copy-editors anymore?

I’ve just been trying to read Griff Rhys Jones’s childhood memoir Semi-Detached. But I couldn’t manage it.

I started halfway through, because I wanted to read about Jones’s musical tastes as a teenager in the late-1960s, and on consecutive pages there is a reference to Alexis Korner as ‘Alexis Corner’, and a description of Joe Cocker – surely one of Sheffield’s most famous sons – as a ‘Nottinghamshire groaner’. And then, on the next page, he says that the part of north London where I happen to live, Chalk Farm, is in ‘central London’.

At which point I stopped reading. It was getting too irritating.

I don’t blame the author. Mistakes happen. But publishers are supposed to check this sort of thing. I’ve got the Penguin re-print, but I assume the same errors are in the Michael Joseph hardback edition. And they really ought to know better. It’s all cost-cutting, I guess.

So, while I’m on the subject, I ought to thank the various copy-editors I’ve encountered over the past few years, who have (I hope) prevented similar mistakes on my part from making it into print: Jon Butler, Merlin Cox, Elizabeth Imlay and Vicki Vrint. And, in particular, thanks to Clare Collinson, who helped on Halfway to Paradise and Magic Gardens, and who has been the best copy-editor I’ve ever worked with.