Proofreading Fun Facts–Plus a Cover Preview!

We just finished our first full proofread of our next issue (14.2, available in November). Here’s a sneak peek of the cover, which features a cropped version of Mary Jo Karimnia’s Delta Fair Sparklers:

We’ve written in the past about our proofreading process—a quick summation for those not clicking through: Five staff members, three genre editors, and the authors all take a look at the issue. Then the five staff members gather for a two-day meeting to ensure all the necessary changes are entered in hard copy onto one set of proofs to return to our typesetter.

In addition to fixing some formatting issues and copy-editing mistakes, we were able to discover some interesting trivia as we worked:

1. The Chicago Manual of Style, the industry standard, released its latest edition this month, in between our copy-editing and proofreading stages. One key change: Internet is now lower-case internet. We have only three instances of that word in the issue, so they were easy to update.
2. Ancient Greeks, not Romans, used phalanxes to fight.
3. Our font uses old-style figures instead of lining figures. That becomes troublesome when a single zero (as in “dial 0”) can look like a lowercase o. We’ve got a fix.
4. There’s some debate about whether Kafka’s masterpiece, The Metamorphosis, is a long story (and, thus, needs to be in Roman font with quote marks) or a novella (and, thus, would be italicized).

In November, you’ll have the chance to see all the things we got right the first time around (we hope), including fun names like Ballinspittle, Beeldenstorm, Ummagumma, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, boeuf bourguignon, Thrasymachus, and the Dornaus & Dixon Bren Ten.