This will be a short post. There’s too much I could say about the subject at hand, so it will be a two-parter.
It doesn’t happen much up here, but I’ve seen it happen south of the border: a wealthy alumnus makes a large donation in the expectation – earmarked on the cheque, visibly or not – that the press will get a large piece of it. And the press knows it. And the donor then contacts the house and tells them, “By the way, I wrote a book.”
I’ve seen it happen only once in Canada, where bequests aren’t as big and so are not as politically loaded. The first thing the ME told me was that the author had financed a prominent research centre on campus, with his name on it. Right, got it, went without saying (though she said it) – kid gloves for this guy. MEs and CEs both will fret when given the slightest chance. The mscript was mercifully short and had been gone over by a competent friend of the author’s, so the CE was light, and so were the author’s changes to the CE. Thank heaven for that. The problems arose when he was sent the proofs. He ransacked them over and over, moving around blocks of text and photographs (there were dozens of those), then changing the way captions were presented. It was clear after a few rounds of this that he was treating the book like a retirement hobby, and we could only wait him out while he bounced it on his knee. With any other author, the house would never have put up with it, but this guy was an academic moneybags. The proofs had to be redone repeatedly – which costs, so thank heaven that wasn’t my worry. But it meant I had to check them repeatedly when I was only getting paid for one look. No, I didn’t charge extra. It wasn’t how I did business.
There’s worse than that. An American house called me in a panic … But that’s for Part Two.
I turned down a project
I’ve been retired for six months now. My final invoice paid out last week (24-3C-UTP-ANASTAKIS-2), twelve weeks due, but they’re forgiven. I turned down a project two weeks ago, the first time since retiring that I’ve done that. It would have been a fascinating one – Roman social history, 584 pp., for an Ivy League house, no less. It would have been my first Ivy League project – a class joint, them – and I’d been cultivating that press for years before they finally called me, six months too late. I thought about taking it on anyway – it would have been a pleasant way to cap my decades in this field. (As it turned out, my final CE project was Commercial Electrical Wiring, 8th ed. – sounds like a whimper to me.) I loved my job, but I don’t actually miss it. This blog is enough for me to keep my hand in.