The Winter 2018 Baum Bugle had finally gone to press, four stress-filled months after our most optimistic expectations. Death, birth, illness, images that didn’t arrive and drafts that came well past their due dates—Murphy’s Law had repeatedly triumphed.
We had put the Bugle to “bed” on Monday and this was Thursday night. With all writing, layout, proofreading, and correcting behind me, I was running errands with my husband. I was, in fact, so far from thinking about the Bugle I wasn’t sure who Sarah was when her voice came through my car’s dashboard.
Houston, we have a problem.
The printer had the layout on the press ready to roll the next morning only to discover it was two pages short. If you aren’t familiar with print production, a sheet of folded paper becomes four pages. There has to be an even multiple of four for a publication to fold correctly. How, you ask, after a dozen proofreaders, could this have gone unnoticed? Well, the inclusion of the kids’ newsletter in the center spread means we have three individual sections of numbered pages; 1-26 before the Gazette, 4 pages of the Gazette, and 27-56 after the Gazette. Shifting pages in the layout back and forth around that center spread had artificially expanded the second half to end on page 56 even though there were only 54 pages. Two pages simply didn’t exist. Sarah and I had both looked at it so many times our brains skipped straight over the omission.
Never mind how it happened. That wasn’t the problem I faced in the Home Depot parking lot, thinking four castors were my priority. Fixing it—that was the problem. Fixing it and fixing it now. Sarah could either pull two pages or add two pages. She’d found a couple of drastic options like converting separate enclosures into new pages, or simply pushing content back to Spring, but she wanted my thoughts before pulling any triggers.
And so it is that your Baum Bugle now includes an entirely unplanned, two-page spread featuring five distinctive, and thus collectible, copies of The Tin Woodman of Oz. Sarah, bibliographic reference books at hand, flew through creating copy and editing the table of contents while I pulled the five volumes from my collection and propped them into a photo and created the layout. I was pouring text into columns when it was only half written. Midnight came, midnight passed.
The next morning, the press ran: 56 pages strong.
Ultimately, we had to remove the Gazette and include it as a separate fold-out in your Winter mailing. There was no way to preserve the strict flow of articles on either side of the Gazette and still get the new file to the printer so quickly. But necessity is the mother of invention, and we’re proud that no content was lost. What could be more Ozzy than friends working as a team to beat the odds?
