Got the quote – more than I was expecting and more than I can afford without borrowing money. So going to look at bank loans and at alternative quotes.

Our repro house excelled themselves today. Their server died over the weekend – and their backups later than Wednesday are useless, so they’re having to repeat the work they’ve done since then. To make matters worse, I’ve signed off on 6 books since Wednesday and so they’ve kept no record of the changes from the previous proofs of these books to the signed-off proofs.

All is not lost however: the files for most of these books will have been sent to the printer, so can be retrieved.* Also, while I didn’t keep records of what the changes were either, I do know which pages changed and photocopies of each signed-off proof. So I can send these copies to the repro-house and tell them ‘make page XYZ look like this’. I can also recall all but three of the changes on these pages and so I can even tell them how to ‘make page XYZ look like this’.

So all is not lost and I have had a reminder about the implications of the termination of corpulent females vocal performances.

Does anyone want my life?