Down to the ‘Jots and Tittles’ of the editing process

Dear Friends and Fellow Pilgrims,

After my ‘On The Launchpad’ post, I had hoped this past week to have been able to make a dramatic announcement within days. Alas no, not just yet. Again, we wait.

However, I’m relieved about this. The seasoned and diligent editors at St Tikhon’s Press have conferred and chosen not to go to press right away, especially after my own recent pass through the book revealed several small typos and formatting issues.

These minor glitches, quite literally the “jots and tittles” of the text (to use an Elizabethan biblical term), came as something of a wakeup call to us, and made it clear that it is better to allow time for another thorough editorial review, rather than to hasten ahead only to discover more foibles in the final, printed book.

We also had to remind ourselves that these newly noticed issues were undoubtedly from the process of adjusting the book dimensions to meet the specs of the new printer in Wales. This major format change could not be accomplished by a simple resize of the file dimensions, but required manually resizing and reformatting the pages, images, captions, and text boxes, and then inspecting the new book file. We also recently added new pages to meet the new printer’s production needs, another unexpected step.

Therefore, I am very pleased to report that one of the STMP editors, who has never looked at the book before now, will be going over it with fresh eyes, and reporting back to us in about two week’s time. Already, in his initial skim of the book file, he noticed an important spelling convention which he urged us to follow, so I am all the more confident of slowing down and welcoming his final review.

For, “Whoever its faithful in a very little, is also faithful in much.”

Thank you for your patience and prayers…

zosimas