The lost art of editing

The long, boozy lunches and smoke-filled parties are now part of publishing's past, but has rigorous line-by-line editing of books been lost too, a casualty of the demands of sales and publicity?
Alex Clark guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 February 2011

A meeting of the board of directors at Faber, March 1944. From left to right TS Eliot, Morley Kennedy, Geoffrey Faber, WJ Crawley, Miss CB Sheldon and Richard de la Mare. Photograph: Picture Post/Felix Mann and Kurt Hutton/Getty Images


Reach for the current issue of Private Eye and you will find "Bookworm", the anonymous author of the magazine's Books & Bookmen column, indulging his or her fondness for schadenfreude by rounding up the worst reviews of this season's crop of new books. The writers mentioned will no doubt simply shrug – or perhaps grimace – to have readers' attention drawn to less than ecstatic comments, especially when numerous glowing reviews are ignored. But "Bookworm" also has a few sharp words for those whose work is undertaken outside the glare of publicity: "it's not only the authors who will and should wince on reading these words. The editors . . . are responsible as well, for being too indolent, timid or unobservant, if the reviewers are right. But will pain spur them to remember that editors are supposed to edit?"

Editors are supposed to edit: well, of course. What else would they do? And why should Private Eye, in the process of tweaking a few authors' noses, alight on those who labour behind the scenes and accuse them of incompetence? The answer lies in the changing role of the editor, in the turning wheel of the publishing industry and in the expectations of readers.

One evening at the end of last September I found myself all set to interview Jonathan Franzen about his new novel, Freedom, on the stage of the Southbank Centre in London. I had anxiously worked and reworked my list of questions, but while my preparation was not in vain, it was swiftly put into perspective by an unexpected turn of events. It transpired that Franzen had that very afternoon, during the filming of a BBC television programme, discovered that the UK edition of his novel contained a number of errors – errors that he thought had been corrected during previous stages of production. In other words, the copies of the novel stacked high in the foyer, not to mention the tens of thousands on their way to bookshops, were not as Franzen, or indeed his publisher, intended. In the green room at the Southbank Centre, a clearly shaken but phlegmatic Franzen outlined his plan to tell his audience – and, by extension, the reading public – of the unfortunate development and to urge them to wait to buy the corrected edition. When he did so, there were – an unusual moment for most literary events – gasps of shock, followed by a nervous silence.
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