Thursday, June 5, 2014

Adventures in the book trade #6

To Tauranga last weekend to do two sessions at Escape!, their mini literary festival. It was very good – well-organised, a wide range of authors, good attendance and, as always at these events, good gossip from the authors.

One told me about her recent experience with a Certain Major Publisher. In a chapter on Roman food, i.e. from Rome 2000 years ago, she wrote that they couldn’t use ingredients from the new world such as tomatoes, potatoes and corn. The editor corrected this to “from New World”.

The author changed it back to “from the new world” on the page proofs.

The editor corrected this again to “from New World”.

The author changed it back again to “from the new world” on the second set of page proofs .

This must have annoyed the editor, because on the final set she changed it to “from the supermarket”.

3 comments:

Stephanie said...

Hilarious, if it weren't an awful comment on recent educational standards.

World of the Written Word said...

Hilarious. But didn't the Romans have supermarkets? I sort of remember one in the ruins of Pompeii. Only they probably called it a superforum!

helenalex said...

Could she not have changed it to 'from the Americas'? Which are not actually any more 'new' than Europe.