Page # references?

[Molly/CA]

Kathleen, as usual I'm not sure where this should go.

As many of you are tired of hearing, my husband and I are doing a revision of his 'Guide to the Freshwater Fishes of California' for University of California Press. It's now three years off schedule and there's yet again a new 'Production Manager.' We have great hopes --this one's not only, obviously, read the book but the stacks of revised revisions and more stacks of our documentation presented to reverse the repeated rewriting of the ms by the biologically and grammatically incompetent.

The manuscript she was given as our last revision isn't what we handed in, though. Between the former 'copy editor' mixing long-superseded previously submitted material with our ms (via Word's 'version tracking') and submitting this chimera as our 'copyedited' ms, and the fact that in the last meeting we weren't allowed to see the 'final' manuscript the person we were meeting with was working from, there are a number of glitches and peculiarities. Here's the first you can, I hope, help with.

In the ms as handed in in about October 2003, we used page# references where the material referenced was physically distant from the current text, formulated according to the Press's instructions to authors:

A cook living near a "catch it yourself" trout farm could purchase and transport trout in an aerated live box (see "Caring for the Catch," P. xxxx), and an angler could...

This stood from 2003 until the last-before-page proofs meeting of September 2004, when we were told we couldn't have page# refs. An 'above' or 'below' was substituted --without our knowledge or consent-- and in the page proofs the above passage now reads

A cook living near a "catch it yourself" trout farm could purchase and transport trout in an aerated live box (see "Caring for the Catch," above), and an angler could...

(bf mine)

Now, "Caring for the Catch" is actually a heading in the previous "Unit" (numbered chapters having been metamorphosed into innumerate 'units' at some point), pages and pages back, and other 'above' or 'below' substitutions for page refs refer to similarly distant parts of the book. Obviously, we can't let these stand. Some section names will need to be located, also: "see 'Universal Accompaniments,' after Method V," or some such clue.

The first question:

What kind of difficulty would likely be involved in restoring the page references, with modern electronic setup? The original subcontractor claimed to be using what's now InDesign, I think. I'd think the final printer in Hong Kong supplied the facsimile of the pages we've been given, but from what? It seems to me that an electronically determined 'page 125' would cause less disturbance in the page formatting than 'after Method V'; 'at the end of this chapter' (oops. The former chapters might be called sections, to readers--) as replacements for 'above,' 'below.'

Next.

The reason we were given for not allowing page references was that it would be too expensive, because when the book was reprinted the page numbers would change. But wouldn't they be using the same 'plates,' the same format, trim size, etc.? The first edition was in print for 20 years and as far as we can see nothing changed from our first prepublication (predistribution?) copy to the very latest books the ichthyology students acquired. Same rather distinctive paper, same trim size, and most important, same text on every page. Isn't that sort necessary in a 'reprint' of a book whose function (partly) is as a text --so that the assignments in it work out? And a revision would of course change everything.

Our suspicion, based on the above and on the timing, is that this was a subterfuge on the same level as the rest of the former excuses for arbitrary and generally unacceptable (because biologically incorrect) changes. Any clarifying comment will be welcomed.

Can anyone guess what we would be asking for in terms of printerly problems if we requested that in addition to striking all the 'above/below' references (not negotiable), the page refs be restored?

Thanks yet again--

Molly