behind the scenes

In the long slow complicated process that leads to the publication of a book — in this case, my biography of Paradise Lost — I am at the copy-editing stage, and whenever I am at that stage with a book, I remember Lauren Lepow. 

In the publishing world, there are many different kinds of editor — or rather, many different editing tasks, more than one of which any given editor is likely to perform. For instance, an acquisitions editor will probably not just acquire your book but will also be for it a developmental editor, a structural editor, maybe even a line editor — that is, one who goes through the book line by line. The great Robert Gottlieb famously did all of these things, which is why he was just called (and called himself) an editor. No adjectival limitation. 

But one task is almost always given to a person called the copy editor. He or she is the person who goes through your text just before it gets to production — that is, just before it is designed, laid out, and typeset — to make sure your spelling is correct, your command of grammar and syntax competent, your quotations and citations (in a scholarly book) appropriate, accurate, and consistent. This is sometimes thought to be a rather mechanical job, so it is often outsourced to freelancers. But some projects place more demands on the copy-editor than others, and for such cases a press dedicated to excellence will have the best in-house copy editor it can find. 

Lauren Lepow — who worked for Princeton University Press from 1991 until illness forced her to retire at the end of 2022, just months before her untimely death — was the copy editor than whom no greater can be conceived. Lauren elevated copy-editing to a high art form. She worked on the first two Auden critical editions I did for PUP, and in both cases I was simply staggered by how much she noticed — she saw every little error, every tiny inconsistency, from one end of the book to the other, and cheerfully corrected it or asked me to do so. She was terrifyingly fast and terrifyingly precise and after that first time working with her I wanted her to copy-edit every book I wrote. 

But that was not possible. I recently wrote to Fred Appel, my (acquisitions, developmental, structural) editor at PUP for the Paradise Lost book, to say how much I miss Lauren — even when the copy-editing process is going just fine, as it currently is — and he replied: 

My colleagues and I miss Lauren Lepow terribly and we still mourn her passing. I was in awe of her ability to cite chapter and verse of the Chicago Manual of Style, and also of her great judgment, thoughtfulness, and thoroughness. I can’t tell you how many PUP authors who had been copyedited by her who then requested her services — in some cases, pleaded for her services — for their second or third books with us. 

I was of course one of those pleaders, back when I wrote my biography of the Book of Common Prayer. But she was then largely occupied with the massive and technically demanding task of copy-editing Auden’s Complete Works, a job that occupied her right up to her retirement. 

When I learned that Lauren had died, I wondered whether I had ever thanked her properly for all that she did for me. Searching my email, I discovered that I had: in late 2017, when I was struggling with the production of The Year of Our Lord 1943, I sent her an effusive message of gratitude, to which she replied, “Thank you for your very kind words — the best possibly holiday gift!” 

Copy-editing is often invisible labor, thought by many to be grunt-work and not really intellectually demanding. This is unfair to every competent copy editor, but grossly unfair to Lauren, who in her thirty years at Princeton must have made hundreds of books far better than they would have been without her. She did an important job, and she did it better than I have ever done anything.