The production editors notes are in grey pencil, the copy editor’s in red, and mine in purple.

It is at this point of the book production that I start to imagine opening the window and jumping out.

Awesome cookbook author Rose Levy Beranbaum (The! Cake! Bible!) describes one of her least favorite stages in the making of a cookbook: Book Production Phase 6 Copy Editing. Notable for the all-too-rare shout-out to her production team:

I feel doubly blessed to have the support and encouragement of Ava Wilder, head of production at Wiley who cares so much about all these details. And triply blessed to have Deborah Weiss Geline as the most amazing copy editor of all time.

Sing it, sister! Poorly copyedited cookbooks can waste not only trees and time, but also chocolate. [Shudder]

Photo: Valentine’s Cakes at Pasticceria Gelateria Italiana by LexnGer / Lex; some rights reserved.

The term “Roman” is customarily used to describe serif typefaces of the early Italian Renaissance period. More recently, the term has also come to denote the upright style of typefaces, as opposed to the word “Italic”, which refers to cursive typefaces inspired by the handwriting of Italian humanists. Thus Linotype offers fonts called Sabon Greek Roman and Sabon Greek Italic, (designed by Jan Tchichold), based on 16th century models. But by using terminology which is typically associated with Latin type and evokes the history of Italian typography, Linotype makes a careless statement. “Greek Roman” and “Greek Italic” are contradictions in terms, mixing two very different histories.

—Peter Biľak, “A View of Latin Typography in Relationship to the World,” Het Wereld Boek (Amsterdam, 2008), reprinted at Typotheque

Huh. Now that you mention it, yes, that sounds stupid.

Photo: Mandragoras by sp!ros; some rights reserved.