The word books are here!

This doesn't matter to anyone outside the publishing industry, and only to about half of them, but The Chicago Manual of Style has coughed up an 18th edition, and made the front cover a friendly-but-eye-hurting yellow rather than their previous trademark orange.  

For those who don't know (and certainly needn't care), the manual is a big book, a list price $75 book, that standardizes everything in the book publishing process from the smallest punctuation to the largest production demands. Newspapers don't use it; they follow the Associated Press style guide. Medical publishers generally follow the AMA's style guide, I believe. I own those, too. And then there's Words Into Type, a sort of rival of CMS, but not given to as many editions. It's often used as a supplement, because there's nothing a 1,200-page cinder block of a book needs more than a supplement. 

The University of Chicago Press began dispensing publishing wisdom in 1891, as a sheet that contained the information for the publisher's compositors and pressmen, who had to deal with scruffy manuscripts from scruffy professors (or so I imagine). 

Even at such an early stage, “the University Press style book and style sheet” was considered important enough to be preserved, along with other items from the Press’s early years, in the cornerstone of the new Press building in 1903.

That sheet grew into a pamphlet, and by 1906 the pamphlet had become a book: Manual of Style: Being a compilation of the typographical rules in force at the University of Chicago Press, to which are appended specimens of types in use—otherwise known as the 1st edition of the Manual. At 200 pages, the original Manual cost 50 cents, plus 6 cents for postage and handling.

It's the bible for most book publishers, as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is for the headshrinkers, or the Pocket Pal is for graphics and reproduction guys. (You may insert your Pocket Pal joke here.) 

The CMS doesn’t change much between editions. The 17th was published in 2017. The last few have been busy keeping up with technological changes. And yet it's important to have the most recent one so that we're all quite literally on the same page. If I get into a fight with an editor or writer over the capitalization of celestial objects, I want to refer them to 8.143 (the 143rd section of chapter 8) to show that aurora borealis is set in lowercase. As you can see, the CMS plays referee.  

Despite this, I used to work at a company where the copy chief absolutely refused to use the 15th edition, demanding that we galley slaves stay with the 14th. I do not know why he had it in for the 15th, but he was not kidding. Down with the 15th! was his cry. Soon after I was laid off from that job, the 16th edition came out. I am still afraid the shock may have killed him. 

I haven't looked at the 18th much yet. I worry that they've decided to stuff it with a bunch of politically correct stuff -- how to handle newly coined pronouns, how to address someone who identifies as a wallaby, that kind of thing. It can’t be helped. At least the book remains a noble defender of the serial comma.

Now that I've whipped you into a Chicago Manual of Style frenzy, you will be glad to know that you can buy merch.

The number on the back makes me laugh. Like you play third base for the Chicago Manuals of Style. Can’t tell the players without a scorecard.

Offices.

Everyone hates offices. I don't know anyone who gets excited about offices in general. No one is thrilled because of the office. Everyone complains about them. You'd think they were sheer torture. 

They're mostly just dull and designed poorly.  

meh

I remember -- but have been unable to locate -- a picture of a big magazine subscription department from more than a century ago. I think it was Ladies' Home Journal, then based in Philadelphia, which advertised itself as "The Magazine with a Million," meaning a million subscribers in 1903 -- a towering achievement at the time, something no other U.S. magazine had done. The subscription office was a huge floor with tiny little desks laid out like a vast bingo card. Each worker had his or her little desk to process subscriptions. It must have been hot, boring as hell, and I don't know how anyone could have stayed awake. No one was rushing to the bathroom to check TikTok or play Wordscapes. It probably paid peanuts, too. 

On the other hand, it was not expected to be a career in and of itself. A man working the tiny desk might be going to business school at night -- a perfectly acceptable alternative to college then. A woman doing the job would probably be expected to leave to get married at some point, unless she was supporting her sickly old mom. But it was desirable work, in that you were not being run off your feet like a waitress or digging ditches like a slob.

Bad and boring as it may be, office jobs were considered superior to other kinds of work. In many regards, they still are, although the way we krex and moan about them you'd think we were getting surgery without anesthesia every day. To be fair, in 1903 there were no overweening tin-pot HR dictators, no "team building" exercises, and no mandatory training to tell you to respect one another's pronouns. 

Did offices ever really have this kind of thing?  

No place I ever worked, at least that I know of. Yes, folks, this is a genuine book from 1962, and this is what guys used to do before X-rated movies and OnlyFans. See why Americans were more literate in those days? We even had to read to get our naughty thrills. 

Things have changed so much since 1962, let alone 1903. Automation and computers have been eating away at jobs for decades, and guys like Elon Musk say they'll even take over the "creative" businesses like advertising. The Internet has devastated the magazine business as much as any other. Ladies' Home Journal closed up shop almost ten years ago. Rival Good Housekeeping is still alive as a magazine, but I've heard that in the 2010s, LHJ had lots of boneheaded management hastening its end. 

Except for those who program and feed the computers, office jobs may be on the way out entirely. We may complain about them, but we'll miss them when they're gone. 

Bartleby the scrivener was an office worker, you know. 

Ah, office! Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!  

Six months and a day!

I used to work with a trust-fund baby. Actually, I probably worked with several of them over the years, because a lot of the people I met in the artistic side of the magazine business had to be able to get in through the rich-kid gate, to wit:

1) Graduate from a good college;

2) Work as an unpaid intern;

3) Live in Manhattan on a crap salary.

After getting through those three phases, they could start to make a decent living. You will note that those three phases require something to back said junior staff member, generally Mommy's + Daddy's checkbook. That enabled them to take jobs that paid nothing or next to it, without worrying about student loans or making the rent. 

I'm not saying they had it easy, nor were they bad at what they did; I am saying that it was perfect way to keep out the riffraff. 

I, the riffraff, came up the hard way, commuting from the outermost borough, being broke for a long time, and never following the path that led to the glamorous and creative end of the business. But I made a living. 

The TFB that I mention at the top of this post, however, was a real classic of the type. Nice guy, and very intelligent, probably more so than I. But he was like a friendly alien dropped on Earth who had to try to guess what Earth people were like in order to go unnoticed. He could be a smartass but did not have a rough edge. He was curious about the lives of skilled laborers like my father. He always looked perplexed. He spent days contemplating aloud the purchase of a rice cooker. Should I buy or not? If so, what kind? A cooker or a steamer? Is one brand superior to another? What quantity of rice is proper? It is a puzzlement. 

Just use the microwave like everyone else!

I remember him telling me about his grandparents. Grandpa, the head of the family in a very real, very fearsome, and very financial sense, was from Massachusetts, but for tax purposes he officially lived in New Hampshire for six months and a day. That 50.01% residency kept him from having to pay Massachusetts' high income tax. New Hampshire only taxes interest and dividend income.

I have since learned that "Live Free or Die" might as well be replaced as New Hampshire's motto:

This is one of the reasons why, when politicians set out to tax the rich, the middle class always finds its taxes going up. The poor saps in Boston who can’t declare residency outside the state get stuck with the bill for the big spending plans that "taxing the rich" was supposed to fund.

Now, I have no idea how Mr. Boston Brahmin Grandpa voted, but if he was like the contemporary wealthy, he would continue to vote for the very policies he was fleeing, wherever he went. In doing so these moneybags screw over the state in which they amassed their fortunes and also the state in which they expect to keep them. 

I do not understand why someone, looking at the laws in their home state and regarding them as unfair and unjust, would support those same laws elsewhere. But they do. Thus, New Yorkers have been accused of ruining Vermont, Bay Staters of ruining Maine, and Californians are being accused of ruining Colorado. It's like they can't help themselves. 

I'm not sure why I brought all this up today, except I was thinking of that trust-fund baby and his grandfather. While TFB was studying this strange form of life known as the "middle class," we were studying him. I've never met anyone like him, but I'll bet in his youth he was like everyone else around him. 

Peculiar fellow. I don't even know if he ever got his rice cooker. 

A plea for reviews.

Well, artificial intelligence and the idiots who use it are certainly trying to make things worse for everybody already. 

Apparently the weenies are cranking out AI-generated books and "flooding" Amazon's publishing platform, among others. They are using it in some cases to take bread out of the mouths of specific writers, as Wired noted, publishing "books" that are just summaries of the actual authors' works but keeping the dough for themselves. 

Even if the work posted is original (meaning, generated by AI as its own piece of garbage, not a piece of garbage piggybacking on an existing work), these "authors" are unleashing a tsunami of computer-generated crap among the actual books, making it harder to find anything worth reading.

Amazon's efforts to combat this so far have been surprisingly low-tech -- asking "Is this AI-generated content?" (Oh, no, I wouldn't do that, Mr. Amazon!) and restricting book uploads to three a day, which for a single account is almost a hundred a month. The bits-and-giggles crowd doesn't care; they just hope to fool enough people to make a few bucks by doing next to nothing. 

My plea today is simple, for all authors, not just me, not just self-published ones: If you've read a book, please leave a review. It's a way to separate a real book from the fake ones, maybe the only way a searcher can find something that's real. Without a number of reviews, search engines tend to ignore books when compiling results. Sure, the weenies can make fake reviews, but that starts to sound like work.  

Seriously, even if you didn't much like the book, leave a review. I think it's fair to say most writers would rather fail on their own merits than because no one knew they were even there. If no one ever finds you, no one can ever read you.  

Thank you very much for hearing my plea. Skynet may not take over the world, but it sure is making it even harder for writers and artists to find an audience.  

Estimating estimates.

A couple of the publishers I work for ask for estimates in advance of work -- how long will it take to copyedit or proofread or fact-check or mark up or whatever some poor manuscript that won't know what hit it. I find this to be very difficult because I barely know what to expect, even if I have a chance to glance over the job. You might be surprised at the lousy condition in which some books and articles arrive from the authors.⭐ They'd have been flunked by some of my old profs. 

"Looks like crap!"

The main problem is, despite being word people at heart, I don't think these publishers all know what the word estimate means. One publisher requests an estimate, but if the job requires a lot more time than anticipated, they go into a panic. It makes more work for the unfortunates who hired me, who have to get approvals and new purchase orders, and it delays payment for the unfortunate me. Of course, the writer and the top editor are really to blame, but they barely know what we're doing -- they only acknowledge my work if I do something to piss them off. 

What this publisher wants is not an estimate but a bid -- a price at which I will promise to get the work completed based on the time and any expenditures required. I would be willing to work under that condition, and in fact I do for other publishers who offer a flat fee for a job. It's not ideal from my perspective, but at least it's honest. 

Everyone knows an estimate is not the same thing as a solid offer. New York, which has strict laws for contractors, even acknowledges that estimates may be exceeded depending on circumstances -- say, the guy who you signed up to replace your siding finds so much dry rot that the neighbors call your home the House of Usher, or the mechanic checking an idiot light discovers that your transmission is about to blow through the engine like the alien through John Hurt. The original estimates were based on what was believed at the time, as are mine -- and I also can't guarantee how long something will take until I start digging in. 

Again, I want to be clear that none of this is the fault of my contacts at these companies, who are some of the nicest and most professional people I've known in the business. It's the bean counters and the pencil pushers who make the procedures, the ones who are in the unenviable position of trying to make publishing profitable in a way it hasn't been since the first movie theater opened and the first radio broadcast went out. But I wish that they would use their terms with more precision. Don't ask for an estimate when you need a fixed price.  

So that's what's bugging me today. What's YOUR problem?

📕📗📘📙

⭐Or maybe you wouldn't.

The pathos of logos.

First of all, don't get on me about how K-cups are a waste of money. I know, I know. But I cannot begin to describe how devoted my wife is to coffee, even decaffeinated. She drinks coffee all day, with small amounts of water and other beverages at meals. Don't begrudge her these small pleasures! Think of the guy she's stuck with! 

Anyway, I noticed a change to the Dunkin' logo on her K-cups this week. (Yeah, I know they dropped the Donuts part years ago. Feh.) The logo is different -- but barely. I saw the contrast because the decaf box was a couple of weeks older than the regular.

You can see that the logo is now a tiny bit larger, and the letters are a tiny bit thinner. It is not a large alteration of the logo they've been using since 1976, but it is different. 

I have to ask why they went to the trouble -- because you know there was a lot of trouble over this. Some marketing pro was sitting there one day, looking at the logo, saying, "You know, if we made it a microscopic bit taller and thinner, it would reflect our more aggressive, active, non-donuts-centric approach to selling coffee." And then it had to go through about a thousand managers among the company's 270,000 employees to discuss, have meetings, create and argue over designs, stamp one thing, eschew another, and otherwise hold up making the change for months, ultimately getting the lawyers involved, because the lawyers are always involved. Does this count as a change to the trademark? If it does, that's a whole new level of hell. If it doesn't, why are we doing this at all? 

I've worked for magazines that made a change to their logos, and back in the days when casual readers would be looking through racks of magazines for something to read, it was a big huge freaking hairy deal to make that change. Sometimes magazines wouldn't do it; they wanted to stick with a logo that they knew was cemented in the public mind. Others feared they were losing readers because the magazine was being considered less reliable or less modern and needed a refresh. When the logo change was decided, it would have to be approved all the way at the top no matter how large the company. That's still true for most consumer brands. 

The thing is, Dunkin' went to a lot of trouble for a change that not one person in fifty would notice. From what I can tell on the US Patent and Trademark Office site, it didn't require an update to the product mark. I would love to know what they were thinking. If anyone involved comes across this page, please let me know. 

And be assured that my wife will continue to enjoy her Dunkin' coffee, morning, noon and night. You could put the logo upside down in Sanskrit and she'd still buy it. You could write it in Hobo or Papyrus and she wouldn't care. Just keep crankin' it out and she'll keep drinking it. 

The gossip truth.

Forgive me if I've told this story in this space before, but I think it's interesting.

In my checkered career in publishing, I've done a number of different jobs, including proofreading, writing, copyediting, and fact-checking. I was a fact-checker before the term became a synonym for confirmation bias. I've had at least one shouting match with an editor who wanted to run bad information because the truth ruined the story. Try that at the Washington Post these days and see how long you have a job.

Probably the strangest week in my career, though, was spent as a fill-in fact-checker at a popular weekly celebrity gossip magazine. I disdain celebrity and I eschew gossip, but I was desperate for work at the time. 

Why was it so strange? Because absolutely everything I expected about the job was the opposite of what it was. Here's what I mean:

1) It was dull.

I thought the work would be frantic, and maybe impossible. "I just got word that Alexis Bigbutt is pregnant! The father is Jimmy Cueball! We need to confirm that!" But no. When those kind of pieces would come in, the writers -- the life's blood of the business -- would just say "That's from one of my confidential sources," and that would be it. We'd just shrug and make sure all the names were spelled right and the ages were correct. Maybe it would have been more interesting for me if I knew who anyone was. But I could not get shocked at news about Gunnah Rimez's drug arrest or the hysterics on Real Housewives of Scranton. 

2) It was quiet.

Consequently, there was none of the running around one might expect of a weekly gossip sheet. The photo editors probably worked harder than anyone, but they kept to their own corner of the floor. Everything else was as quiet as a bank vault. I barely got to know the two women in my department. We took care of whatever crossed our desks, then it was back to Internet surfing.

3) The place was dark.

Everyone thinks Manhattan magazine offices are bright and sunny, because they believe everything they see on TV. This was an old building and the managers had all the windows. Those of us in the pit in cubicle city got no sun at all. Not that I was jealous -- we were on a low floor of the building, sandwiched in the middle of the block, so on two sides there were no windows and on the other sides you just looked at the buildings across the street.

4) Everyone was really nice.

Really, not a soul was mean or brash or snarky or creepy or crude. I don't even think anyone stole lunch from the fridge. The celebs may have hated the rag (although in fact they love gossip media -- it's all publicity), but it wasn't because the editors were cruel. It was a friendly office. 

I'd like to say they also paid way above the going rate, but they didn't; it was good, as I recall, but not generous.

After my week, they thanked me and said they'd let me know if they needed me again. In fact, I did get a call not long after, but in the meantime I had gotten a temp job that meant more hours for a longer stretch, so I had to turn them down. 

A few months later I was back in the book end of the business, working for an academic press in an office that was even darker and quieter, but less friendly. Everyone had a resentment. It also had the slowest elevators of any building I've ever worked in, and we were near the top floor, so it took forever to yabba-dabba-doo and get out of the place at quittin' time. (The actual top floor was a 17th floor penthouse, believe it or not, where a mysterious personage dwelled. On a dare I rode up to that floor, but I could see was a dark foyer and a front door with frosted glass.) 

All that is another story, however. 

Having a X time.

This one's kicked around the Internet for a while, and I went looking for its source.

It's a clever take of the early-to-mid twentieth century type -- using the forms of the new era (in both senses of the word) to poke fun at the stuffiness of the formal letter-writing era and the current mania for speed and efficiency, while at the same time affecting the gladhanding merriment of the man on the go. But is it real?

I wondered, because while most of the slangese seemed American (all wet, dough-re-mi), needing "a pint" seemed more British. However, a man in American desiring a pint would normally be looking for a 16-ounce bottle of booze to carry him along rather than a pint of beer in the pub, so that might fit.

And I was right, in the end. Thanks to eBay, I found other cards of this type. What we see here is just half of the front of the card; here's a whole card.

The seller included a photo of the card's back, which told me the thing was made by Dexter Press of West Nyack, New York, a half hour drive from where I'm sitting as I type this.

The Postcard History site has helpful information on Dexter, founded by Thomas Dexter as a one-man press in 1920. It's well known among postcard buffs for the "natural color" postcards like the one above, which were printed after 1952. Another postcard-interest site tells us that Dexter closed its operations in New York in 1984, and moved to Aurora, Missouri: "As a subsidiary, they now print religious material under the MWM Dexter name." But that entry was from 2017; an attempt to follow the link to the MWM Dexter site came up blank. At some point they became (in whole or part) Dexter Hospitality, but now it looks like that's gone too. I fear for the current state of Mr. Dexter's company.

As for the Indian-themed card above, the Postcard History site dates it to 1962. That makes sense. The language in the oh-so-snappy checklist is just a little dated. It doesn't sound like the way the kids talked in 1962 ("pep" and "helluva" sound more forties to me), but probably the way a breezy guy who'd been a kid ten or twenty years earlier would talk.

So that's what I found out about a little slice of Americana. If anyone knows more about the fate of Mr. Dexter's company, drop me a line. I'm always curious about publishing. 

Career moves, career schmoves.

Years ago I worked for a big-name magazine, located in Midtown Manhattan. You'd know the name; it was on every supermarket checkout line in America. And no, it was not one of those cheapass publications that followed celebrity tan lines or the adventures of Bat Boy. This one had been around for 100 years and was rock-solid as well as famous.

Not this one either. I'm not that old.

It was a good job in a fun workplace with great people and a sense of camaraderie. 

I wanted out. 

The problem was, the head company had no interest in developing talent within. This I base not only on my own experience, but also on that of coworkers. You were what you were and you might get ahead if you were brilliant and devoted to the job around the clock. That's how my boss got her spot. But me, I would probably be in the exact same job for life. 

So, I drove to Secaucus and interviewed at a trade magazine that covered the adventures of floor products. I totally nailed it down, as they say in the floor business.

I didn't get the job.

I've thought about this from time to time over the years, and I keep coming back to a strange conclusion. You see, I was at the top of my copy game in those days, and my résumé was excellent. I was as close to being fit and still had most of my hair, and looked good in a suit. I think they were impressed by me at the interview, during which I met multiple staff members. But there was one sticking point.

They could not get past the idea that I would leave a prestigious consumer magazine to work for a small trade magazine. 

I tried to impress upon them that this was an opportunity with a company that had a rep for training and promoting from within. Further, as a guy, I was about as interested in the content of that consumer mag as I was in floor products anyway. And further yet, I would be trading a frustrating New York City commute for a much faster (if still frustrating) drive to work. That last point I didn't play up, but it was certainly part of the appeal.

Ultimately I think I didn't get the job because they didn't believe me. They may have thought I was about to lose my job at the consumer magazine, or maybe I was clubhouse poison and on my last leg there. Why else leave work at a famous magazine to go into the trades? (Never mind that the trade job paid at least as well....)

Just one of those weird lessons in life. I'm pretty honest, and like a fool I expect people to believe me. But sometimes they don't, because sometimes the truth makes no sense to them. 

By the way, don't look on the supermarket checkout and wonder which magazine I worked for. The Internet and bad management killed it dead a few years later. Not sure if the floor products magazine is still around under a different name, but I wouldn't be surprised in the least. 

The underpants scandal.

The latest victim of cancel culture is the great superhero Captain Underpants, or rather, Captain Underpants's co-creation by the same author and illustrator, Dav Pilkey. I'm not surprised at anyone being attacked by the woke mokes, but was confused about what happened in this case. The problem is supposed to be "passive racism" in a spinoff book. The New York Post reports:

The publisher announced it will no longer distribute Dav Pilkey’s 2010 graphic novel, The Adventures of Ook and Gluk: Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future, saying in a statement released last week that the decision had been made with the “full support” of the author.

The author, of course, issued a groveling apology: “But this week it was brought to my attention that this book also contains harmful racial stereotypes and passively racist imagery. I wanted to take this opportunity to publicly apologize for this. It was and is wrong and harmful to my Asian readers, friends, and family, and to all Asian people.”

So what the hell was in this book?

The credited George Beard and Harold Hutchins are the child protagonists from the Captain Underpants books, and let's be very clear that they are not supposed to possess genius intellects. I've only seen a couple of illustrations from Ook and Gluk, and nothing seems too shocking -- just appropriately dumb for a book by a couple of little boys.

[sic] their village

I found it hard to believe that any were published in 2010. It's not like this guy was doing cartoons about the Japanese during World War II, like Dr. Seuss; this was eleven years ago. What's the issue? 

Amazon and Barnes & Noble have already pulled it, and Scholastic has told libraries to burn it. To the fire! You are not of the body! But my library system allows digital downloads, so I borrowed one quickly before they got the word -- and discovered Mr. Wong of the kung fu school, who teaches the heroes martial arts and saves the day. 

So Mr. Wong in the Mr. Miyagi part is bad, but geez, everyone looks goofy in this book. That's the point. It's a funny adventure as told by two knuckleheaded boys. But there's your passive racism. Meh, I call BS -- Mr. Wong is a hero of the story; all the bad people and stupid people are white. Who cares?

I wondered also if the depiction of kung fu, or the use of the term itself, was, as they say, "problematic." Merriam-Webster defines kung fu as "any of various Chinese martial arts and related disciplines that are practiced especially for self-defense, exercise, and spiritual growth," so perhaps the spiritual aspect that makes it turn up in a kids' gag book also made it offensive. I mean, I don't think this is the equivalent of Ook and Gluk traveling to the future, being ordained as Catholic priests, and then defeating the enemies of "there villege" by consecrating the bread and wine.  

Hard to believe, but it was almost ten years ago now that Simon Ledger was arrested on the Isle of Wight for singing the 1974 #1 Billboard Hot 100 hit "Kung Fu Fighting" by Carl Douglas. "A man of Chinese origin" who was strolling by the karaoke bar took offense, reported the offensive disco classic to the police, and Ledger was hauled out by the bobbies. Ultimately he was not charged, but the point was made. In response, the irrepressible Mark Steyn has been singing the song at appearances ever since. 

I guess we know who's next on the chopsocky block:

Could be!

Never mind that Phooey is a non-racially-aligned dog. And being voiced by a black performer and being the "Number One Super Guy" will not save Hong Kong Phooey's hash. So far he's safe, but that won't last long. 

I have to wonder who really got under Scholastic's skin about this Ook and Gluk book. Was it the Communist Chinese Party, which has been throwing its weight around all over the place, in matters grave and pesky? Was it a group of Asian children, more concerned about stupid books than attacks on Asians in cities or denial of college admittances to Asian students? Was it a genuine kung fu master, offended by the slight? Or was it a bunch of white women who make it their focus to be offended all day, every day, even by things that don't offend them?

If it's the last, they ought to be careful -- I hear a lot of them like yoga, which Merriam-Webster defines as "a Hindu theistic philosophy teaching the suppression of all activity of body, mind, and will in order that the self may realize its distinction from them and attain liberation". Their flippant abuse of this spiritual philosophy sounds pretty offensive to the Hindus, you ask me. I would hate for the perpetually outraged Karens and their yoga mats to be cast into the outer darkness like Ook and Gluk.

The blindness of the intelligentsia.

Today we address the latest fad from publishing, courtesy of a major journal known for its deep dives into thorny intellectual problems. I am of course referring to Esquire magazine.

"Fact Checking Is the Core of Nonfiction Writing," notes the title of the article in question. "Why Do So Many Publishers Refuse to Do It?"

Well, as someone who has done fact-checking work for more than twenty years, I can tell you one reason right off the top of my head: Publishers are cheap. Even in the heady days of 2000, when publishers had money, and the Internet hadn't started to pick off newspapers and magazines like tin monkeys in a shooting gallery, publishers were tightfisted about copyediting and fact-checking. Why? Because the production budget margins were slim, and anything that wasn't sales (advertising, special direct sales, subscriptions), fat paychecks for talent, editorial bonuses, or loaded expense accounts was overhead. We were overhead. We were speed bumps that the editors and writers hit on their way to the sunny uplands of publishing glory. We were the damp sock in the face that said "This author writes like a fourth-grader with narcolepsy" or "Everything in this piece is a lie." It was never phrased that way, but that's how it feels on the other end of the sock. Who'd want to pay for that?

But that's not what the author is driving at here. Best-selling true-crime-story peddler Emma Copley Eisenberg is asking why book publishers don't pay for fact-checking staff to make sure the books they publish are accurate.

Fact checking is a comprehensive process in which, according to the definitive book on the subject, a trained checker does the following: “Read for accuracy”; “Research the facts”; “Assess sources: people, newspapers and magazines, books, the Internet, etc”; “Check quotations”; and “Look out for and avoid plagiarism.” Though I had worked as a fact checker in two small newsrooms, did I trust myself to do the exhaustive and detailed work of checking my own nonfiction book? I did not.
      From reading up on the subject and talking to friends who had published books of nonfiction, I knew that I would be responsible for hiring and paying a freelance fact checker myself. This is the norm, not the exception; in almost all book contracts, it is the writer’s legal responsibility, not the publisher’s, to deliver a factually accurate text.
      As a result, most nonfiction books are not fact checked; if they are, it is at the author’s expense. Publishers have said for years that it would be cost-prohibitive for them to provide fact checking for every nonfiction book; they tend to speak publicly about a book’s facts only if a book includes errors that lead to a public scandal and threaten their bottom line. Recent controversies over books containing factual errors by Jill Abramson, Naomi Wolf, and, further back, James Frey, come to mind.

I'm willing to take her question at face value here. The main reason that publishers don't want to fact-check -- and neither do authors -- is it means less money for everybody else. She says that for one her books she had thousands of pages of documents and hours of transcripts. I am not questioning her work ethic at all. I am saying that it would take the fact-checker about the same amount of time to go over all this information, even if it were well organized (which most writers are not), so what does she expect them to be paid? The starvation wage for such work is $20 an hour, so you're looking at possibly $20,000 at least if you want such research checked. That's all going to come out of sales, and thus out of the writer's pay. How many of them would sign on for that, especially writers who are more confident about their research?

Unbelievably, Eisenberg was able to get someone to do one of her books for just twelve grand, for which she paid herself out of pocket. I credit her for the willingness to do that rather than face fire or possibly lawsuits for getting the facts wrong. And she was lucky to get a good fact-checker; elsewhere the article cites the story of a writer who hired a freelance fact-checker that was not so good, and introduced more errors into the work. Not many people really have experience in the field, you know, and those that claim to often have worked for biased publications or celebrity outfits that just want a rubber stamp on what they publish.

Then there's this thought:

But the reason why the publishing industry has been slow to implement such guidelines for fact checking may lie further down in the foundation of the whole system. Without widespread consumer awareness that most books are not fact checked, or about which imprints publish which books, there’s no real reason for publishers to care about fact checking. If it comes to light that a book contains major errors, it’s the author, not the publisher, whose reputation takes the hit.

She's right about that, but doesn't make the case why the publisher should care. I've done a lot of work for a publisher that will put almost anything labeled nonfiction in print, all kinds of stuff, and they really and honestly don't care if it's truthful. Why should they? No one's going to say, "This book on the Reptilian Conspiracy leaves out crucial data! I'll never buy a book from Knucklehead Press again!" No, they'll say, "Joe Bloe's book on the Reptilian Conspiracy is a waste of time! Don't buy it!" And if the sales are lousy, the editors at Knucklehead won't bother to contract Mr. Bloe for more books. It's still cheaper than having a big fund for fact-checking and lawyers that doesn't come out of author's royalties. But Eisenberg, who I suppose as a reporter is studious about facts, seems to think publishers can pay for this out of the unicorn golden fart fund, because the Internet has demolished the book publishing industry pretty well, and most books lose money.

The person who brought this story to my attention -- you probably guessed I'm not an Esquire reader -- was fuming because publishers ought to pay! for fact-checking, to stop the spread of fake news! I'd like to know whose fake news was intended by that statement. The healthcare pros who said we couldn't visit Grandpa's deathbed but it was okay to mob the streets for a protest? The fact-checkers at Rolling Stone who gave a thumbs-up to the Duke Lacrosse story? The sharp-eyed researchers at CNN who approved the "fiery but mostly peaceful" reportage?

NB: This is fake but accurate.

For some reason, the same people who ask "Who watches the watchmen?" about the police are completely willing to trust reporters and fact-checkers, as if they don't have their own biases and prejudices. Or, more likely, they know they have biases and prejudices, but they're the "right kind." Which is how I've gotten in trouble over the years for my fact-checking work.

One last point, and this may be the most important point: Insane or not, con artist or not, the book author will almost certainly know more about his subject than the fact-checker will, but the fact-checker can only go by accepted wisdom. So in cases where the book goes against conventional wisdom, the fact-checker would red-pencil everything until the publisher has no choice but to pay a kill fee and cancel the project. What does this mean? Surely half the diet and nutrition books peddled to the lay audience would never see the light of day. And no book questioning orthodoxy on global warming, sexual identity, or the sanctity of certain politicians would ever get to galley stage. What would be next? Books arguing against Keynesian economics, the 1619 Project, abortion and euthanasia, and whatever else is a "protected subject" would never be published. Many people in the business, almost left-wingers all, might say "So what?" Here's what: Other books under the don't-question-orthodoxy rule would include Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri vi, Pasteur's The Germ Theory and Its Applications to Medicine and Surgery, and Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. In other words, if I de-platform (as the kiddies say) the cranks and the crooks because they disagree with mainstream opinion, I'm likely to kill the truth as collateral damage. Better to publish them all and let the truth work its way forward. 

Whatever it is, I'm against it.

I don't know what they have to say
It doesn't matter anyway
Whatever it is, I'm against it
No matter what it is or who commenced it
I'm against it

Your proposition may be good
But let's have one thing understood
Whatever it is, I'm against it
And even when you've changed it or condensed it
I'm against it

I'm opposed to it on general principles
I'm opposed to it...

The great Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff of Huxley College set the tone for my acceptance of anything in the media. Speaking as one who has long labored in the mines of book and magazine publishing, I have seen many silly ideas turn into fads and turn into "musts," for the simple reason that some ding dong had some encounter with a freak out there in the world who had some life-improving idea; with the enthusiasm that only the young and over-moneyed can enjoy, that ding dong sold her friends on it, and through the media it was broadcast to the world. This is how we get useless things like cucumber slices on the eyes and dangerous things like Goop. A few years down the line, when all America is enthralled with the dopey idea, the original true believers say "What was that all about?" as if they'd never been involved, because they're on to the next fabulous idea. The consumer can never catch up; you're always going to be at least one dumb idea behind.

This kind of stuff is big in newspaper features and women's magazines. You may find dumb ideas in Popular Mechanics or Family Handyman, but they aren't touted breathlessly as the best thing EVAH. Well, not usually.

So here are some things I'm against, possibly on general principles, but also because I think it's dumb and I don't feel like it. I'm not saying these things have no merits, but as modern Big Ideas they leave me cold. I've spent my whole life resisting peer pressure and I'm not giving in now.

YOGA
It is probably is healthy, and maybe it helps you relax, but it's not for me. I would look like an olive trying to balance on its toothpick. Everyone on the health-care commercials is yogaing away, but of course only a small percentage of the population is really interested. Most of us would just like to be less fat. We are perfectly happy to find inner peace in church and/or lying on the sofa. If you want a reason to avoid yoga, call it cultural appropriation. I don't care. Just leave me out of it.

VEGANISM
A doctor may force me into it one day, but it will be to save my life, not the cow's life. It's unlikely to happen anyhow. There're few health conditions that absolutely require abstaining from all animal products. Despite that, the news media and our betters in the international health community and the global warming gang want me to give them up. Well, I can be sentimental about animals enough to try to give up meat one day, although fish and chickens are dumb and probably need to be eaten. In any event, you'll get my ice cream when you pry it from my literally cold and possibly dead hands.

ELECTRIC CARS
I have nothing against the idea, but the technology isn't there. This little fact was buried for years after the so-called documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? came out in 2006. You want to know what killed the electric car? Reality. People have the idea that you can charge a huge battery by zapping it with the Heart of Atlantis, but that's horse hockey. A pal of mine got a call on the way to work recently from his boss, who was stuck on an exit ramp when he forgot to charge his Tesla. He was driving through New Jersey and the thing turned into a two-ton paperweight. My pal had to come babysit the car, and the Labrador in the backseat, while Boss took the company truck and went to work. Because you can't send someone to Sunoco for a gallon of electricity. I've thought a network of battery changers would be useful, but at this point you can't just pop out the old batteries and pop in the new ones. Maybe one day -- and maybe one day our electricity will come from nice, clean nukes or maybe unicorn farts instead of fossil fuels -- but that day isn't today. So the Tesla runs on fossil fuels and nukes anyway. So shut up and let me drive my car.

BEST-SELLERS BY CHARLATANS AND AGONISTS
Nothing is going to stop the liars, cheaters, carpetbaggers, chiselers, swindlers, faddists, and snake-oilers from publishing books full of lies, like some recent best-sellers I know of; it has been thus and ever shall be. But don't tell me to -- nay, insist that I must -- read them. Furthermore, I have no interest in the agonists, meaning writers who pack their novels with horrible tales of woe meant to show how the badass female lead (always female) overcomes all the terrible strawmen (always men) who stand in her way. I guess there's an audience for this stuff, which is paint-by-numbers no matter what the setting, but I'm not part of it. The people who are ought to realize that they're being fed an illusion as much as any Hallmark Christmas movie watcher. The difference is, the Hallmark fan knows it's fiction.

These are the bridges that are too far for me. And if you don't like my general principles... Well, to quote Prof. Wagstaff's twin brother, or someone who sounded like him, these are my principles, and if you don't like them, I have others.

Mob Mechanics.

I sent a letter to the editor of Popular Mechanics. I would have liked to send a punch in the nose, but you can't mail that, and besides I'm to busy to face charges. God knows there are a lot of people who would benefit from a punch in the nose, but God also did not appoint me to the job of distributing them.

This is in response to a ghastly story posted to the magazine's site, giving instructions to the mindless know-nothings terrorizing our cities about how best to tear down statues "using science." Because mob rule is allowed to trump civilization if the mob is really, really having a tantrum and can't even, apparently. There is some thought that the piece is satire, but it doesn’t strike me that way — and it’s hard to believe a magazine from Hearst, home of condescending wokeness, would dare satirize the mobs.

Here is what I wrote:

Dear Editor:

Have you absolutely lost your minds?

Popular Mechanics is a magazine about building, about human achievement, and you run a story catering to the mindless mob?

Next up: E-Z Molotov Cocktails! Zip Guns for Children! How to Lay Siege to Government Buildings! Make Your Statement with the McVeigh Method!

You ought to be ashamed, but since you work for Hearst, I suppose that’s impossible.

-Fred Key

If you are inclined to weigh in on the subject, pro or con, I suggest you let the editor know your feelings care of editor@popularmechanics.com. Or you can write to the glass house that Hearst spends its days in near Columbus Circle (soon to be Indigenous Persons Circle, I suppose) in Manhattan:

Gee, nice building. I sure hope
the woke mobs don't decide it's
"problematic." 

Popular Mechanics
300 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019

I've never worked for that particular magazine, but I've always admired its dedication to the art and science of engineering and tinkering. Now it wants to be on the side of brutal, stupid destruction. The editors have chosen poorly.

Home eck.

Some years ago when I was between jobs, I pitched a story to a friend who was still employed at a national magazine directed to the young homeowner. At the time the economy was thought to be in terrible shape, largely because it suited the desires of politicians and the media to portray it that way, and all the talk was about economizing. (The economy had little to do with my unemployment, as the economy has been poor in publishing since the start of the widespread use of the Internet.)

My story idea was based on the old shilling gas meters that were common in rental housing the UK. The downside was that if you were without a coin when the gas stopped, you would freeze; the upside was that you knew just how much you spent to keep the place warm. It occurred to me that most of the time we spend money without even realizing it, and I'm not even talking about Amazon Prime. In days of yore, families had a rough idea of what things cost; now we may not ever even see the bill, the money being removed easily from our checking accounts after we sign up, until our credit rating suddenly falls like an anvil in a Looney Tune.

They knew home economics back then.

I proposed to calculate the amount of money spent every time one boiled some water, turned up the thermostat, did a load of whites, took a ten-minute shower, ran the dishwasher, microwaved an enchilada, left a light on in a room all night, and several other daily household activities, so that the happy homemaker would start to understand where the money all goes. The money pitch: How much would you economize if you had to insert money for the gas, electric, or water meter each time you wanted to do these things?

I confess that memory of my father contributed to this idea -- he had an undeserved rep in the house as a tightwad, but he did go around turning down the gas and turning off lights, and always worried about money.

Anyway, I never heard back, which means no. The magazine might have gone for it if I'd had a better name as a feature writer, but I doubt it. I think they thought the story would be a total downer. It would make the Nervous Nellies more nervous, it would make the Sammy Skinflints cheaper, and it would be ignored by the people who don't even want to look at the electric bill anymore because it's boring and upsetting. As I've noted elsewhere, magazines, especially those devoted to one gender or the other, have been treating their readers like retarded children for some time. Still, I confess that the magazine I pitched to liked a breezy, upbeat style, and a penny-pinching piece wouldn't have suited them.

As I think about it, hard-facts stories like mine when applied to weight loss or general health are much the same. They are devoured by the true believers who already live the kale-and-Peloton life, but ignored by the mass of people like me who squint when they have to go on the scale. And yet those articles always find a home. Maybe it's true that Americans are just weird about money. As far as I know, coin-op gas meters never really had a market here.

Fred's Book Club: Itty Bitty.Books.

Welcome back to the Humpback Writers, the book feature that has little to do with humps or backs, or sometimes even writers, but always falls on Wednesday.

This week we have a twofer -- two miniature books from the great year of 1995 that are very different indeed. Actually it should be a fourfer, but I'll explain.

In 1995, the Penguin publishing company was celebrating its 60th anniversary, so they decided to do a run of little tiny books called Penguin 60s. In Penguin's ancestral home of the UK they released two sets of these, each with 60 books (a "black" set and an "orange" set, based on the spine colors), but in the US/Canada they just had one set of 60 in orange. I think they all retailed for 95 cents ($1.49 Canadian!) and were usually found near the cash registers, which is how I came to own these. I'm a sucker for impulse buys in bookstores. The books were either self-contained pieces (stories or essays) or excerpts from longer works. Writers included modern and past luminaries like Goethe, Will Self, Poe, Robertson Davies, Kipling, Patricia Highsmith, and so on. Penguin, of course, made its name beginning in 1935 as a publisher of paperback versions of good literature, intended to make the benefits of quality books available to all. You can see their original ten books here.

The company seems to have done similar anniversary series for their 70th and 80th anniversaries, but I think only in the UK. Whether they will do a 90th anniversary series in 2025, who knows. Impulse buys in bookstores don't move the way they used to, because there are fewer bookstores. I would doubt it anyhow. Penguin merged with Random House in 2013, and now the fabled publisher is a mere imprint. Nothing like a merger to wipe out a company's culture and history.

But the Penguin 60s series was fun, and played on the publisher's mixed history of classical literature and new books. Take for example the Milne Pooh book on the right; it takes pages from Winnie-the-Pooh, When We Were Very Young, and Now We Are Six. The Teachings of Jesus book contains excerpts from the King James Version of the New Testament written out as essays. I also have The Lives of the Saints, excerpted and translated from Fr. Omer Englebert's encyclopedic biography. These books are all 50 to 90 pages long, and fit in your shirt pocket or the palm of your hand.

I used to have a fourth book in the series, a story published previously by Stephen King in his 1993 collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes: Umney's Last Case. It's an interesting and weird detective novella. God knows what I did with it. Could be with the box of books in the cellar, or maybe I lent it to someone like an idiot. The story was adapted for TV in 2006 for TNT, starring William H. Macy.

So those are some of my small books, but these are not the smallest books I own; that pride of minuscule place still belongs to the baseball book I profiled here back in January. And, as I said earlier this month, aren't miniature things fun?

And here it is!

Thank you for putting up with the shameless self-promotion this week, but I'm proud of this book and happy to get it into reader's hands. And here it is!

The Kindle edition, for the very reasonable price of $2.99, is available here. If you'd rather have a tangible edition, that is available for the unbeatable price of $16, here.

I wanted the price to be on the lower end because I am hoping that younger readers will be interested in the book. And let me assure any teenagers who might happen on this site, that I promise upon my honor that this is not a coming-of-age novel. It does, however, contain a large and goofy dog.

I hate to be a schnorrer, but: If you should read the book and enjoy it, please do leave a good review. Life on Amazon is all about the reviews; if Tolstoy was writing today and got no Amazon reviews, he would have been just some crazy fuzz-face scribbling to himself in the darkness.

I actually thought about profiling my own book in the usual Wednesday book feature, but I thought that was cheesy on the scale of government-giveaway-cheese cheesy. So we'll have our own seemingly random other book profile tomorrow. (The criteria for being profiled in Fred's Book Club are: Is Fred familiar with it? And ... that's about it.)

So let's meet here again tomorrow to see what the Humpback Writers have for us. I really do love books, you know; sometimes even my own.

A publishing disgrace.

Amélie Zhao is a young lady who was born in communist China. She achieved something remarkable at a young age: She got a major publisher to publish her first novel, Blood Heir. I can't begin to tell you how difficult a feat this is. "Dream come true" doesn't describe it, because that's when something wonderful happens without significant input, like winning the lottery. "Massive, amazing achievement" is more like it.

And then, the social justice warriors took it all away.

This is a fantasy novel, and it wasn't supposed to be released until June 4, but now it may never be. Why? Because the author was forced to withdraw it after being shamed by a sea of losers who fancy themselves "warriors." Why? Here's Rod Dreher's explanation:

Very few people have even read the novel, but the mob attacked it as racist for a variety of reasons, one of them being that Zhao created a fantasy world where “oppression is blind to skin color” (this, from the press release). It’s a fantasy world, and people haven’t even read the book, but the mob was certain that Blood Heir is racist, and that its author — a young woman raised in Beijing, but now living in New York City — ought to be shut down.
     Today, they got their wish...

They shamed Amélie so much that she decided to ask her publisher, Delacorte (an imprint of that little outfit called Random House) to pull the book. She says Random House agreed to this, but I wonder if they'll try to get her to reconsider; there's contracts involved, but most important, by this point Random House will have invested thousands upon thousands of dollars. Editors, designers, production people, marketers, advertisers -- they won't give back their pay. The thing may be already printed, but if by chance it isn't, the press time and paper and whatnot has been booked and paid for. Random House may not want to take a bath on this just because some dopes decided to go after another scalp.

Amélie wrote:

It was never my intention to bring harm to any reader of this valued community. 

Well, for what it's worth, here's my advice:

Tell them to pound sand, Amélie, and pound it hard. Then bark at the moon. The people gunning for you have not even read the book. They do not get a vote. They are not a "valued community." They are jackwagons and bullies.

Never, never, never, never apologize to the Twitter mob for something like this. They're not going to let you back in with your next book. You have a target on you now. They will be watching. That's what self-appointed Cultural Revolutionaries do.

Meanwhile, they're empowered to go find the next person they can ruin. And I do mean ruin -- they want to drive people to suicide, but they'll settle for you changing your name and leaving the country.

These are people who think the film Mary Poppins is racist now because Mary gets into blackface. Because she was inside a chimney. They get mad at old pictures of coal miners because the long-gone miners were in blackface. Because they were MINING COAL. These people are showing a rare combination of idiocy, ignorance, and viciousness. To hell with them.

Look, I've worked on a lot of these YA fantasy novels, and most of them are pretty awful. Soggy romance, tiresome and humorless heroines, meaningless action, improbable violence, boys who behave and think like no boy on earth has ever behaved or thought, and most of all, no matter what fantasy or SF world they are set in, a rigid adherence to the most asinine political correctness tropes going right now. However dystopic the world may be, to the SJWs they would be paradise, because every single thing they believe (at the moment) is believed by the good guys, and all the things that the bad guys believe are the things that average people believed about ten minutes ago, and the SJW heroes get to kill these bad people and win in the end. There's no mental exercise required for writing or reading these books, except for the laborious box-ticking.

I hope your book was better than that, Amélie, and if you had avoided bowing to their bullying, then it would have been. Believe me, the books I work on are not improved by political correctness. It only helps show how little depth the writers possess.

I don't fight publishers on this stuff, though; publishers are already encouraging political correctness as hard as they can, and they wouldn't listen to me anyway. This is more reason to think your book was in no way offensive to any progressive community, because -- and this is no small point -- Delacorte would have told you so. Everyone at Random House, I guarantee, believes in all the progressive things that the very people who attacked you believe in. Yet they saw no harm in your book.

If publishers want to publish crappy books that exist mainly to reinforce the tropes of Cultural Revolutionaries, I can't stand in their way; anyway, I believe in free speech.

Amélie, you ought to also. Write what you want. Maybe your next book should be The Pounding of the Sand or Bark at the Moon. You can dedicate it to the people who tried to destroy you. But whatever you do, stop apologizing. This is a free nation, or it will be as long as we are willing to fight the kinds of people who attacked you. They don't deserve your apology.

Columbus: Floater.

I don't really feel like writing about Columbus Day today. I've written before about that remarkable man and the history behind the day; also about how Italians need to fight back against the menace of "Indigenous Persons Day" (a day solely made to try to eclipse Columbus and the spirit of discovery). Today I'd just like to note my own history of Columbus Day, which hasn't been much of anything since high school.

What I mean by that is, I've had to work every Columbus Day I can remember since I started college. Sure, my college was closed for the holiday, but not the office where I was lucky to have a part-time job as a general flunky. (The stories of things I massively screwed up in that job would make Will Ferrell, Pauly Shore, and Jerry Lewis wince.) I don't even know what the business did. Something real-estatey. It was a small, family-owned firm, and all I know for sure was that they both generated and received a lot of mail.

That was how I found out that, in a large city, although the mail would not be delivered on Columbus Day, you could send a flunky (me) down to the local post office to get the mail. All you had to do was bring something on letterhead authorizing said flunky to pick it up, and I think call ahead to let them know the flunkster was on his way. Please note that this is all to the best of my memory; don't quote me. It was a long time ago and I was as new as a baby out of the womb, and knew about as much.

Anyway, all this meant that I wound up dragging a couple of sacks of mail about seven or eight blocks back to the building. But that was okay; every other job I'd had to that point had involved lifting heavy things. Much worse was a later, rainy day -- possibly Veterans Day -- when I had to deliver a dozen sacks of mail to the same post office on a wobbly cart with wonky wheels that was not large enough for the job. That's another story.

This was my first job with an actual paycheck, a check that had actual taxes taken out of it. It would not be the last. And I think that all those jobs in my future would have this in common: no Columbus Day off.

"You! Get to work!"

I'm not sure, though. My first job in publishing was a small outfit connected to a nonprofit, and those guys get every holiday. But in the deadline-driven places I subsequently worked, holidays were often a major inconvenience and fit to be ignored. One job involved coordinating with a lot of British people in London, who were not off on Columbus Day, of course. Magazines I worked for closed issues around the second week of the month, which meant that not only was Columbus Day not a holiday, but it was a late night. I don't say all of this to complain, just to note that I haven't often had the day off. In fact, I have a huge pile of work to do today.

Columbus Day is, sadly, like Veterans Day, a second-tier holiday that people seldom get as a paid day off. They may be given the days as floaters, to use on the holiday or some other time. Many of those who do get these days off have little respect for Columbus or veterans. I guess that can happen to national holidays in a nation where millions of people have strong but varied priorities.

I just want a day off with pay. But Columbus didn't get one; why should I?

The Boy of Paper.

Do any actual boys deliver actual newspapers anymore?

Never mind the fact that hardly anyone seems to get the paper anymore. Neither do I. When we first fled the city and moved here to fabulous Hudson Valley suburbia, I insisted on subscribing. I wanted to get to know the place. I figured reading the paper on my way to work would give me a feel, some "local color" as it were. And to an extent it helped. Eventually I got annoyed with their slanted coverage and sometimes amateurish reporting, so I dropped it.

Plus, I never got the box.

I guess the promotion had ended a while before I arrived. It seemed like at one time, every new subscriber would get a box he could attach to the mailbox post, a box in which his newspaper would be placed, as gently as one would a newborn babe, every morning.

Guess the age of that promotion.

In all the years here, I do not think I have seen a newspaper delivery person use one. They throw the papers out the car windows like they hate them. Most boxes have fallen off the poles, or have been removed by disgruntled homeowners.

And they are adult delivery persons, not paperboys or papergirls. Or newspaper has been delivered by an array of grown-ups who are willing to get up very early and drive around in their own (often elderly and infirm) automobiles to deliver the news, God bless them. There's a lot of turnover in the business. Are any newspapers delivered by kids anymore?

I think it's great when teenagers have jobs -- they learn a lot about responsibility, duty, and if the job has a legit payroll, how the government screws over a paycheck. These are important lessons. But I must confess my jobs before college were never on the books, and usually involved shoveling or hauling or mowing.

The one time I delivered newspapers, I was filling in for a friend while the family was on vacation. It was easy, but it didn't seem that way at the time. It was in one of the Outer Boroughs, not Manhattan, but it was a route that covered a couple of apartment buildings -- very little walking, no exposure to rain or that hot summer sun. I think the thing that made it hard, or that I used to make it hard on myself, was terror of screwing up. I knew that if I didn't deliver to the right apartments that my friend would get heat for it, and I didn't want to let him down. I also hated the idea of an adult being mad at me. But I managed to get through the week without incident.

It did not, however, make me want to run out and get a route of my own. Most of the paper deliveries I did after that were courtesy of Atari.

Fred's Amazing Weight-Loss Secret!

Yes, friends, I'm happy to unveil my amazing weight-loss secret today! And the starting price for you is... absolutely nothing!

"But Fred," you say, totally gobsmacked by this news (and if you are not, please step away, smack your gob, and return when it is truly smacked). "How can this be?" you say. "The starting price is nothing? The secret is amazing? And aren't you kinda... fat?"

Well, the answer to your questions are: Yes, yes, and I prefer to other nomenclature. Some might say "fat," while I might say "husky." Some might say "morbidly obese," while I might say "cheerfully obese." Attitude counts for so much.

I do a lot of book editing, as many of you know, and I've done my share of diet books. Many do not call themselves diet books -- these days they promote "health" and "well-being" but if they didn't have at least a tacit promise to show you how to discard the lard they would never get printed. So let's call them diet books and be done with it.

I happen to believe they all work. Yes, every single one of them. And that is part of the secret.

I've known plenty of people, men and women, who have gone on diets at various ages and lost a pile of weight. All sorts of diets, too: meal replacements, paleo, Atkins, vegan plans, Weight Watchers, calorie counting, sugar-busting, the pizza diet, the cabbage soup diet, you name it. They worked just as advertised. (Please note that in this essay I am not referring to people with serious medical issues like diabetes and cardiac disease who lost weight when they had the fear of actual death put into them, or those who had inadvertent weight loss from cancer or its treatment -- although most of them put weight back on.)

All these folks had to go buy new pants. Everyone looked great. And then they all ballooned back up, usually worse than before. Most of the time this happened very quickly, sometimes in response to a life event, because we can't completely change our thinking and our body fights us hard to regain that weight. I never saw a fat person become a skinny person and stay that way.

EXCEPT....

Here comes the secret!

The secret is to evangelize the weight loss. The people who remain successful are those who do not just lose weight and keep it to themselves; they try to spread the word and get other people excited about it. In other words, they have a sense of mission and purpose and meaning connected to the weight loss that keeps them focused on continuing the accomplishment. And for many people this means they must become pains in the butt.

Vegans who lose weight from cutting the cheese (heh) and other fatty animal-based foods out of their diets are famous for being annoying to those who consume meat-based products.

As an ethical choice, they are compelled not to be quiet, I guess, anymore than a pro-life Catholic cannot remain silent about the issue of abortion (which comes up a lot less frequently than "What's for lunch?"). So they have a sense of mission built in. Weight Watchers has groups where people who work for the program hold meetings in which they help others and the others can help one another. Overeaters Anonymous uses a modified version of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, the last step being "Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to compulsive overeaters and to practice these principles in all our affairs." All 12-step groups caution members that to keep the gift of freedom from addiction they have to give that gift away. AA will tell you that you can't expect to stay sober in a vacuum, and they have plenty of stories of what happens to those who try.

I think we need to take this sense of mission into account when we look at successful dieting. Unfortunately I don't think this secret is good news for any of us. Why? Three reasons:

1) Most of us who wish to lose weight would really like to not make a big deal of it. We'd just like to do it and feel better and look better and not annoy other people. We hate being lectured and we don't want to become lecturers. So the idea that we have to hector our loved ones at Thanksgiving repels us as much as pumpkin pie attracts us.

2) The favorite way to evangelize weight loss, especially for Coachella types, is to write books and annoy everybody (especially the lardo who has to copyedit their books). They have to fight their way onto The Doctors so they can smile at and belittle fat people on TV. They say they want to help others, but they really want to be rich and famous. The secret is that deep down they're afraid of blubbering up again, and they know that being rich and famous for a weight loss plan will keep them honest. So yeah, they kind of really do want to help people, and that's the secret. But there's only room for so many diet books and diet plans out there; even if they get published the odds are a bazillion to one that they'll make it big. The vast majority of people who follow the diet plan will fail -- why should they evangelize someone else's plan? -- and go on to something else; the TV appearances will stop and the book will go out of print. Can they stay thin in obscurity? All us other losers can't, apparently.

Which brings us to:

3) Even if you know the secret it is no guarantee to continued healthy weight.

So my secret isn't much of a secret. I think that looking this over, Overeaters Anonymous is probably the best way to lose weight and keep it off (OA also deals with other food problems like anorexia, binge eating, and bulimia -- it saves lives). The problem with that is the person who can't lose weight would have to admit to being "powerless over food," and that is not the kind of thing someone who just wants to drop 30 for her high school reunion is prepared to do. Hell, most people who drive cars into trees, get fired for drunkenness, give their bartenders more money than their mortgage company, and have more outstanding warrants than actual friends can't admit they've become powerless over alcohol.

So there's my secret, and it's no help. Come back tomorrow when I explain why health food pushers are awful.