My fault

The problem with being your own book designer is that if any errors slip through, you have only yourself to blame.

So it has happened here.

My publisher, fellow Lichtenbergian Jeff Bishop, sent me a box of 20 copies to use as magnanimous gifts or summat, so I took a copy out to the labyrinth to read through. (It’s short, and designed to be quick to read.)

It was something of a shock to hit page 47 and see this:

What the hell? The image of the WASTE BOOK was “text-wrapped,” that is, the verbiage should have flowed around the book, not under it. At least that’s the way I laid it out in Adobe InDesign, and that’s the way it looked every time I obsessively scrolled through the file before sending it to Boll Weevil Press. Something happened in the export to the PDF we send to the printers.

And that’s my fault. Jeff sent me the proof, as author, to check over, but I, as book designer, knew there was nothing wrong with it, so I didn’t open the file and go over it. In my defense, I was unaware that InDesign might introduce errors like that.

There was one other, smaller, layout glitch, and a couple of punctuation thingies that were definitely my fault, so I fixed them, exported the file, double-checked the file, and sent it off to Jeff. There will be a brief hiatus while the mechanism grinds my book back into the churn.

Here’s the deal

If you have bought a copy of A Young Person’s Guide to Lichtenbergianism with this error, I’d like to replace it for you. All you have to do is take a photo of you holding the book open to show p. 47 and email it to me with your mailing address. I’ll send you the newly corrected edition.

Again, apologies!