Groundhog Day

On 6 January of this year I submitted the complete text of my biography of Dorothy L. Sayers to the editors at Oxford University Press, including the editor of the Spiritual Lives series, my friend Timothy Larsen. Tim promptly returned to me a list of queries and corrections, which I responded to, also promptly. It was now late January. Then we had to wait for the response of the “clearance reader,” a role I admit I do not understand. But eventually I was told that the cleaned-up and corrected typescript had been sent to Newgen, a production company that OUP works with. When I heard this my heart dropped into my shoes. When I published The Year of Our Lord 1943 with OUP-USA, I had a nightmarish experience with Newgen: I kept making corrections only to have the original errors restored; communications were maddeningly unclear, with pasted-in answers to questions I did not ask; someone at Newgen had written an MS Word macro that queried every sentence that had quotation marks but no…