On day one of my new job, my manager brought me over to my new desk. As you may have noticed in my most recent post (in which I was only slightly bragging), I have some awesome views from the cubicle.
But after admiring the view for a while, I turned my attention to the books along the top of the cubicle. I'm not sure how the books they place on the cubicle shelves are selected - I seemed to have a random assortment of things from Chemistry textbooks, to a medical self-diagnosis handbook, to a small book entitled "Author's Guide to Manuscript Submissions for ____" (with the blank being the name of this publishing company). My manager noticed this last book too, with its old cloth binding and pretty gold lettering. He picked it up to flip through it.
"That's cool," I said, "What's the pub date?"
"1950," he replied. Then he paused on a center-spread in the middle of the book, featuring a large flowchart that explained the submission process (e.g. Author -> Editor -> Production, Marketing, etc). "Know what's bad, though? This is pretty much exactly how we still do things," he said.
So the next time someone tells you that our world is completely different today than it was almost 60 years ago, you can reply that one thing has remained constant: Book publishing.
Seriously. One of our main operating systems is still DOS based (think those black-background white-text computer screens in bad 80s sci-fi movies).
But there are advantages to working in an old-fashioned industry. For example: big welcome lunches for new hires on their second day of work! And super-friendly co-workers and a conscientious work environment. Old-school is definitely not all bad.
In other news: This is my 100th post! I can't believe I've found so much stuff to blabber on about for this long :P
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