Edition, subtraction
On multiple forms. Probably divisive.
One of the more unexpectedly difficult experiences in writing, for me, is reading my own first-printing hardcovers. All I can see is the small handful of typos and infelicities of speech that slipped through multiple passes, though like floaters in the vitreous humor, they’re probably enlarged in my own sight and nearly invisible to others. God bless the paperbacks, which have all the corrections in place—and if Break, Blow, Burn, & Make goes to a second hardcover printing (the first was small), those books as well.
This happens in spite of several thoughtful, careful people besides myself taking great pains over the copyedits and proofs, and in spite of my own combing the PDFs and advanced reader copy for errors until the text blurs in front of my eyes. That errors make it into print in spite of our best efforts likely serves as an object lesson in humility and the inescapable imperfections of being human. I wouldn’t know. I clutch at the idea of perfectibility.
Which, I should say, is only imaginable in the print version of my books, and not electronic or recorded editions. I am sure there are titles for which this is not the case. But because I have limited time and energy, apart from pronunciation queries,1 in every case I have invested that time and energy in the print layout.
To give an example of the degree of attention paid, here is one of the more watch-jewel notes on the proofs of Break, Blow, Burn, & Make:
I used to raise an eyebrow at people who pick fights over kerning. Now I flag lines where the letters are spaced too widely and ask for manual adjustments. It’s not all being a nuisance: I also recognized Worthy Books’ silent decision to lay out the chapters with footnotes, rather than endnotes, as the expensive and generous favor that it was.
In terms of limitations: only recently, which is to say, three years late, did I have had time to go through part of the electronic edition of On Fragile Waves and request formatting changes and corrections. I’m hopeful that those updates will be out soon to everyone who purchased the electronic version, bringing the file closer to the print version, and thankful to Erewhon/Kensington for making them. Prior to publication, I had hand-coded the opening page with HTML tables to replace the screenshot of text that was originally used, but didn’t have the capacity to check the rest of the file until last week. On Fragile Waves in particular had always been to me a physical printed artifact first and foremost. Even after the fixes, especially for anyone reading on a screen smaller than a laptop, the electronic edition is still likely to be a worse experience than the print.
I think any text created for print with complex formatting is probably diminished in ebook form: most poetry, for example, or a triple-nested footnote in a Terry Pratchett novel that was a lovely visual joke on the physical page and in the ebook a painful hyperlinked jump after jump into some disorienting space at the end of the file. Conversely, since its layout is simpler, the electronic and audio editions of Jewel Box are probably far more faithful to the text than those of my other two books. (I haven’t bought the electronic edition yet to check.)
In terms of audio, due to the impossibility of translating layout, font faces, etc., the recording of On Fragile Waves probably leans closer to an adaptation than to the book itself. I have no any idea how many footnotes from Break, Blow, Burn, & Make made it into the recorded version; I’m sure the illustrations didn’t. That said, I have been lucky to get gloriously talented voice actors for these books. Once I can get sound files burned onto CDs and shoved into the car’s CD player, I’ll find out what the audiobooks sound like.
Of course there are cost and geographical and health constraints that make one or another version the only possible option.2 But if you are spoiled for choice among the formats of any of my books, the one I have dusted and polished to distraction, giving far too many notes on text-dividing ornaments, drop caps, and the horizontal space between closing quotation marks and superscript footnotes, is the print edition.
Typos and all.
Notes
Kind people I’ve never met have said kind things about Break, Blow, Burn, & Make:
Makoto Fujimura (Art + Faith): “One of the best books I’ve read this year.”
Daniel Torday (12th Commandment): “Best book on writing I’ve read in ages. Read it immediately.”
If you wanted a signed copy of the third book or any other, I believe you can order from Third Place Books and make the specific request in the order notes. The Ravenna and Lake Forest Park locations currently have signed copies of all three books, if I’m not mistaken.
- interviewed me for Christianity Today about Break, Blow, Burn, & Make. On her own Substack, she has also written a series of close readings of John Donne’s poems, including this post.
Looking back over my past essays, I think “Hammer and Tongs,” written three years ago in the summer of 2021, is particularly interesting to reread with the knowledge of the present (and future). I’ve lifted the paywall on that one for a bit.
There is a recurring moment of panic in the production of every audiobook where the team sends a list of difficult-to-pronounce words for me to annotate in IPA and I realize in horror that I don’t know how to pronounce anything in Polish, Swedish, Dutch, French, etc. (‘Guy Debord’ is said how?) and also that I don’t remember if the qaf in Moqattam is a hard voiced k or a glottal stop. (Glottal stop.) At which point I dig around online and on Forvo for recordings of names (Forvo seems to have recently lost a large number of them) and send the links over, fingers crossed.
I learned about Forvo from the remarkable Paul Topping, Director of Research at Recorded Books, whose background is in linguistics and who was the person who decided long ago that RB ought to go with Pimsleur rather than the alternatives—a fact which has made a large difference in my life. I have just now found this delightful 2005 NYT profile of him.
His advice is why the audiobook of Jewel Box uses my modern translation of a passage of Chaucer instead of the Middle English that appears in the print, which was the right call, even though I preferred the original.
There is no one, to my knowledge, who can step in to replace his depth and breadth of knowledge when he retires.
Apart from piracy, do whatever you need to. I cannot overstate, however, how uninterested I am in the playground fights of “My choices are valid!” etc. If you want moral superiority, volunteer at a food bank.
May 2025 update: Paperbacks for Jewel Box and Break, Blow, Burn, and Make are indefinitely delayed due to low hardcover sales, and the requested ebook reformatting for On Fragile Waves was rejected by Amazon, so it's not clear when that will be fixed.