[HPforGrownups] Re: Copy Editors

[Pen Robinson]

No: HPFGUIDX 43740


On Friday, September 6, 2002, at 09:36 , bboy_mn wrote:
>
> bboy_mn, now ever so humbly responds:
> Let's say that I might have overstated myself in the heat of the moment.
>
> It's just that with so many discrepancies between so many different
> versions of the same book, I have to wonder whether people are REALLY
> following the rules that you so clearly laid out?
>
> When one version says Hagrid borrowed a motorcycle that he clearly
> says in another book, was given to him, and when one version says he's
> going to take it back to Sirius and another says (roughly) he is going
> to store it, that would seem to imple that if Rowling is reviewing all
> this, even she doesn't know what happening in the book. JKR knows her
> books to well for changes like this to slip past her. Given the
> significants of some of the changes, I have trouble believing JKR
> approved them. Can't prove it, but that's how I see it.


I suspect the problem may well be that JKR didn't have things perfectly 
thought out right back at the beginning.  Now that the books are 
published and being read by so many people, I have no doubt at all that 
readers are sending in queries and nitpicks galore.  Some of the 
mistakes being corrected are just mistakes which (unfortunately) slipped 
past the editors and copy editors in the first place (though I find it 
hard to excuse the ancestor/descendant mixup, and that speech of Fudge's 
about the curse scar).  Other amendments may be because JKR has 
subsequently realised that what she originally wrote doesn't stand up to 
the level of scrutiny it is getting from the readership.  That, IMO, 
would explain a change from returning a motorbike to Sirius, to putting 
it in storage.   Since nobody had any reason to query the original 
version until after they had read PoA, there was plenty of time for the 
original to be republished, but if it has now been changed to something 
that makes slightly better sense in retrospect... well, so much the 
better.  Perhaps we had all better resign ourselves to buying a complete 
set of the books about five years after the issue of book seven!
>
> So while I'm sure you are 99% of Copy Editors (so that's really what
> they are called, huh?) do a fantastic job, my own personal private
> view is that somebody is falling down on the job with Rowling's books.
>

Hmm... I do feel *somebody* should have stamped out a few of those 
'Harry had never seen/done/eaten.... in his life' phrases.  But 
listening to the books makes them stand out more than reading them does.

Pen