One of the most fascinating things about publishing my first book is to see how it has slowly made the journey from a bunch of files on my computer, to something that you can find in shops, libraries, webstores, and even in my hands. There’s a lot to say about the process, but this post will pick up on just one little detail, which I personally find quite revealing.
I made the decision to style my book according to MHRA guidelines. One such guideline is to make use of the serial (or ‘Oxford’) comma. I duly went through my manuscript, checking that there was a comma before ‘and’ in every list of three or more items. This took a while, and has now ended up making me extremely sensitive to the appearance (or absence) of serial commas. So when I got an email from Cambridge University Press with a mock-up of my book’s cover, the first thing I noticed was the absence of just such a comma. My book was ‘Criticism, Performance and the Passions‘ and not ‘Criticism, Performance, and the Passions‘.
I wrote immediately to my contact, who, on 25 November 2020, confirmed that the title would be corrected to include the comma on the inside and the outside of my book. Phew.
But then I started to notice that sometimes my book title appeared without its comma. Google for example both has it with and without comma:
Maybe you hadn’t spotted this. With all my hypersensitivity to commas, I was definitely going to. And now I can’t stop doing it. Amazon has a similarly split presentation of the book, as do a lot of other booksellers.
Of course, this little quirk of punctuation doesn’t allow me to see anything in particular about the way that books are brought out into the world, but it does allow me (and now you) to realize the extent to which the arrival of a book is very much a process. By making a change like this at one point in that process, a little of what came before and after is now more visible.
And, yes, if this book is reviewed, I will be checking to see if they have the comma or not…
My book, Criticism, Performance, and the Passions: The Art of Transition was published in March 2021 by Cambridge University Press. You can order it direct from the press, with a 20% discount, by using the code SMITH2021.