headed for the printer

The reason I’m up this late is because zerO Books wanted me to give the final OK to send Towards Speculative Realism to the printer. I asked for a few minor changes on the back cover, and also scrolled through the text itself one last time. The editing was all finished many months ago, but it’s never a bad idea to scroll through the text and make sure that some disastrous formatting error hasn’t crept in. But the text looked to be in fine shape.

As for having it sent to the printer, I’m not sure exactly what that means for the release date. Will there be a long queue at the printer’s? Will they print the book immediately but then steadfastly hold it in a warehouse until the mid-November release date? Or will they make it immediately available for sale a few weeks from now?

I just don’t know. I’ve never made it this far with zerO before and don’t know how they do business at this stage. In the case of Open Court, which published my first three books, I was always FedExed a copy of the book a few weeks before anyone in the public knew it was available. In fact, Tool-Being was FedExed to me in Dublin after being printed several weeks earlier than I was told would be the case. I already had train tickets for Galway that day and started reading the book en route, after it reached me just minutes before departing Dublin.

It’s a nice memory, but it wasn’t especially nice at the time… I have a now well-established pattern of loathing each of my books on the first reading, which I find about as awkward as it would be to stare into the mirror for three hours straight. It now takes me about 2-3 years to appreciate reading any of my own books. And after enjoying it once at that stage, I tend not to look at it again for many years, if ever. I’ll reread them all when I’m 60 or so, just as Roland Barthes enjoyed doing.

This suggests a new method of simply not reading them when they first come out. The problem with that is that you feel impelled to read them immediately. If there was some grotesque printing error, you need to know about it so as to be able to report it.