Dear Geist,
Is it my imagination, or has the proofreading of books gone downhill in the last ten years?
—Greg Koan, Cyberspace
Dear Greg,
Probably. We don’t have any proof, but we do know that book and periodical publishers have an increasingly tougher time making ends meet, and more resources have therefore shifted from editorial to marketing. Publishers and writers tend to be OK with this trade-off. An example: for the first couple of years of Geist, our business envelopes (remember envelopes?) bore a return address of “Vancvouver, B.C.,” but everyone knew what we meant, and we’d ordered 500 of them, and we chose to invest a bit more in a subscription drive than to order typo-free stationery. It would be grand to have the wherewithal to iron out every last flub in a publication, wouldn’t it? Then again, if we demanded perfection, no book or issue of Geist would ever be published, so . . .
—The Editors
