The page proofs for Public Representations have arrived, and I’m going on radio silence to review them by the publisher’s ambitious two-week deadline. The great thing about the page proofs is that you can finally see what the book will look like in print.

Public Representations will comprise 330 pages for text and footnotes, with another 45 pages of references. Because much of our book involves paratextual discussion, we often expand upon our commentary in footnotes. We want the footnotes to be accessible to the reader at the same time as the main text. This is becoming an unusual choice, as publishers prefer to reduce their composition costs by putting all the notes at the end of the book. The initial copy-edit gathered our footnotes and converted them into endnotes, but my co-author Beth Herst and I persisted in expressing our preference.

Forty-five pages of references for a 330-page book might seem like a high ratio. However, our extensive treatment of paratextual discussion involves a large number of references, many of which are online.

Reading page proofs mixes the joy of revisiting our work with the tedium on finding little mistakes, such as references that aren’t quite correct and table headings and entries that aren’t aligned correctly. Yesterday, I was re-reading our discussion of the multiple controversies engendered by films dealing with race, such as Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln, Ava DuVernay’s Selma, and Spike Lee’s BlacKKklansman. We look forward to this being available to readers in several months.

A younger version of myself could continue to do posts, read page proofs, and teach classes at the same time. That’s not me now. I will focus on reading the page proofs. I look forward to resuming this blog soon.