Etiquette For Writing In Books

[Ianigsy]

I have a friend who used to copy edit books to supplement his income from his day job- a copy editor is basically the person who gets the text from an author and goes through to make sure that the spelling, punctuation and so on are OK before it goes to press. Because he was working on Doctor Who novels, he was extra careful with them, but I would expect that from a publisher's point of view, a TV tie-in novel is low prestige and will be farmed out to somebody cheap and/or inexperienced. My friend copy edited several books before he was actually sent on a course to learn how to do it properly, so the person who was given the Buffy novels may not even have had much training!

When I finished my degree course, I gave away a lot of the books I'd studied because they had so many notes in them that they were practically unreadable- I used to underline things as I went and then put slips of paper in to mark the places that were important if I came to write an essay on the book. Of course now I don't buy physical books any more, so it's largely irrelevant, but I did report one book I took back to the library a few months ago where somebody had made pencil notes under the photos.

 

[Tranquillity]

In my reading of Buffy novels there are always a lot of mistakes - gramatical and canonical. I think they were a fairly rushed product.

As for writing in books - I'm a librarian and I love it! Once, at the school I used to work in, we found an old history text where students from about thirty years ago had written a note about their history class and teacher and then over the years other students had replied and added their own observations - it was a wonderful little insight into the changing views of ancient history students over the years. I also love a notated novel or text book - a circled word, an underlined sentence and emphatic YES!! written beside a paragraph - it just adds so much enjoyment to the reading process, for me anyway.

I remember reading one of those awful continuation novels once, I think it was of Pride and Prejudice; it was terrible - a travisty of written word. I wrote a long rant on the title page why no-one should ever read that book then returned it to the public library and hopefully save someone else from making the same mistake I had made.