Instead of trembling in their seats or breaking out in a cold sweat, members attending the October monthly dinner meeting, "Publishing Nightmares-Night of the Living DEADlines," could mostly be found rolling on the floor or wiping tears of laughter from their eyes.
Bill Ralph from Wadsworth Publishing Company stole the spotlight with example after example of worst-case-scenarios-come-true: The cover of a serious tome on theories of existentialism wrapped, stitched, glued, and firmly bound around the text of Stickeen's The Story of a Dog. A carefully designed, lovingly printed, four-color cover with the closest attention paid to creating just the right atmosphere . . . the only thing missing being the title of the book. A beginning trampoline text with, well, a small goof in the positioning of the art:
Randall Goodall from Seventeenth Street Studios also prompted a number of laughs
with the description of last-minute "tweaks" to a self-help book's design, like
eliminating the initial drop cap of every chapter opener because the author
started every chapter with the word "I." And the interminable Yiddish poetry
book (three years in production with poems appearing weekly in envelopes marked
"Include!") whose author couldn't decide which name to use (given a choice of
three, he finally picked two and hyphenated them) and who was widowed and remarried
during the course of production but decided to keep the same dedication, "To
my wife."
Casimira Kostecki from Benjamin/Cummings also engaged the audience with elaborate tales of how "important" marketing stickers appeared and disappeared from the cover of a nursing book, and then, of course, there were the 35,000 books that were mistaken as returns and destroyed.
The evening ended with a rather lengthy skit on a one-line joke by the Bookbuilders Mystery Guest. Great costume, though!