14 September 2010

Balzac manuscript

" Eugénie Grandet autograph manuscript and corrected galley proofs signed, 1833."

I would hate to have been his copy editor or typesetter or whoever came next in the publishing process.

Source (with zoomable image), via book-aesthete and Uncertain Times.

3 comments:

  1. I'm a typesetter by trade, and that thing is an utter nightmare.

    I thought some of the work I get sometimes is bad!

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  2. The next time anybody complains about proofing something, I'll trot this out. Amazing! I wonder how much is total rewrite?

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  3. To make it worse, for each book Balzac wrote, printers had to course through this sort of thing several times. Balzac would first send a draft to the printer, have it typeset and printed, and then he would make this mess of notes, then send it back; this would be repeated several times. The printer apparently had a Balzac specialist who was the only one allowed to set type from his manuscripts. As you can imagine, this process made it a costly endeavor to publish a Balzac novel!

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