Barbara Dean, Island Press

Thursday, 23 Oct 2003

COVELO, Calif.

The sky was streaked with red at dusk last evening and true to the sailors’ advice (“red sky at night … “), the sun is piercing the morning fog right now, promising another day of clear blue brilliance. I know that by mid-October I should be hoping for the beginning of the rains, but it’s impossible not to welcome each gorgeous new day.

Today I am hoping to catch up on some of the tasks I didn’t finish yesterday, as I ran (virtually speaking) from one meeting to the next. Today only one meeting is scheduled — on Thursdays at 10:30 a.m. Pacific time we alternate between a meeting of the Publications Committee (last week and next week) and a production/editorial meeting, which is today.

Publication schedules are critically important to everyone involved in making or publishing a book: marketing has promises to distributors, bookstores, and sales reps, and must coordinate direct mail schedules, course adoption cycles, overseas and domestic conferences; publicity may have scheduled events around a publication date or be planning to hook press releases to a news cycle; administration is concerned with cash flow (will sales start to come in when projected?); production needs to keep a whole list of books moving forward, troubleshooting and problem-solving along the way; editors need to coordinate the process of getting endorsements for the back cover with the production deadlines; and, of course, authors are keen to see their work between covers, and eager to have books in time for course use, key conferences, and Aunt Mary’s birthday.

The production/editorial meeting helps to keep all of this planning on track and brings together the people who can solve the problems that invariably arise during the complex seven-to-nine-month process of transforming a manuscript into a book. The all-important pre-meeting material is two schedules — production and pre-production — which are probably the most regularly consulted pieces of paper (yes, most of us print them out) at Island Press. The production schedule is updated each week; pre-production every two weeks.

The 10:30 meeting is organized by editorial subject area; one editorial team after another comes (in person or via the black box) to go over the publication list. First, the production editors explain the status of each book that’s in some stage of production and review any difficulties, which some of the rest of us can sometimes help to solve; then, we editors give an update on the status of manuscripts on our desks (or about to be) that we will be transmitting to production within the next three or four months (and for which production needs to be prepared with copy editors, designers, and in-house attention).

I sometimes wish that authors could sit in on this meeting. Especially during this biweekly half hour, I am struck by how many different pairs of hands a manuscript passes through on its way to becoming a book. Words and images go from author to editor to transmittal editor to production editor to copy editor to designer to typesetter to proofreader to printer to indexer — and at each of these stages, this unique manuscript (these words, these images) are the sole focus of attention and care from a particular skilled person for a critical period of time. The manuscript is passed from hand to hand, and the end product is the culmination of the individual effort of many people, all of whom are personally and professionally invested in the quality of the final book. Even with the increasing influence of technology on the production process, bookmaking still has many of the characteristics of a fine craft.

Okay, I can see those eyes rolling, and you’re right — it doesn’t always work this way. I, too, have heard the horror stories of embarrassing publishing mistakes and unexpected glitches along the way (and have even been part of a few that we won’t go into here). Mistakes happen, despite everyone’s best efforts and despite the planned redundancy at key points of the process (proofreading by a professional freelancer as well as the author, for example). But, really, most of the time the process works, and the final book is the product of the skill and dedication of all those hands and minds — beginning, of course, with the author’s.

After today’s production/editorial meeting, I need to return calls from authors and a couple of my D.C. colleagues, work on negotiating pending contracts, and try to catch up with emails and proposal reviews. But first, I will make the noon trek to the mailbox (one-half mile away from my home office, on the county road). Twenty years ago, the daily mail delivery often set the agenda for the rest of my day, since communications with authors were primarily by letter, and manuscripts and proposals always arrived via the mail carrier.

These days, nearly all of those items arrive electronically, so the mail isn’t quite the focus of my work pattern that it used to be. But the trip to the mailbox still marks the midpoint of my days.

Today, I’m going to extend the mail journey with a noontime adventure with my dog, Chira, a four-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback. Chira and I take a long walk every day, usually in the late afternoon. But today I want to take another look at part of the land that is in the mailbox’s vicinity — a large patch of yellow star thistle that I noticed over the weekend was still putting out new flowers much too late in the season.

Yellow star thistle is one of the most devastating of California’s invasive plants. When I moved here 30 years ago, none of the knee-high plants that put forth sharp spikes and yellow flowers grew in this area; over the last decade, I have watched star thistle establish itself and begin to take over meadows, roadsides, and fields all around Northern California. I know that the problem is even worse in the rest of the state. My co-owners and I (the land I live on is co-owned by 15 people) have struggled to figure out what, if anything, to do about the star thistle on this square mile of land that we love and for which we are responsible.

Our ownership group is in many ways a microcosm of society, and the diverse opinions about management strategies reflect a full range of values about wildness, human management, technology, and the relative importance of all these things. (Well, I guess we don’t reflect quite the whole range of values: No one is arguing for using herbicides). All of us agree that we want this land to be wild and healthy, but translating those goals into our life on this land is not straightforward. Some people are wary of any human intervention in natural processes; others feel that being good stewards of this land means making careful and humble management choices.

The star thistle control options include hand-pulling (very labor intensive, hard to do on a large area), mowing (means buying and maintaining machinery that may cause unnecessary other damage), burning (potentially dangerous in the season when it would be most effective), and importing weevils that target star thistle as biological controls (and risking a Pandora’s box of unknown effects). As we have worked through the options, it’s been important for us to learn about the ecology of star thistle, how it not only crowds out native plants but also, with deep taproots, upsets water cycles, which are particularly sensitive in California’s wet-season/dry-season climate.

Learning about the global context has also helped us to understand the dimensions of this problem. As Paul Ehrlich has said, “Humanity is finally recognizing that invasive species are a threat of the first order to native biodiversity around the planet and to crucial services supplied by native ecosystems.” Understanding that “our” square mile is tied to the global ecosystem is a critical link in connecting our daily lives and responsibilities with the large and sometimes distant-seeming threats to natural systems on a global scale.

Because of the importance of this topic within the overall concern about biodiversity, Island Press has published five books on invasive species in the last four years, and we have three more in production for publication in 2003 and 2004. (Click here to learn more about our books on invasive species.) The different books are written for various audiences, ranging from the general public to international scientists and officials; they discuss theory, policy, and management strategies, and offer case studies of successful and not-so-successful efforts to control invasives. My hope is that all of these books will help to provide some of the information and guidance we all need to make the right decisions and take the right actions in both our private and professional lives to help safeguard a natural and healthy environment for now and for future generations. Biodiversity affects everyone, and protecting it is a task for us all.

Ah! The sailor’s motto is proven right again: The fog has completely dissolved, and the meadow is full of pure clean sunlight.