In praise of copy editors

We're in the final stretch with two monographs. Today I went through the copy editor's review of one. Although doing the pickups is laborious, it's obviously far better to deal with them now than to wince in pain discovering them later. Through painful experience, we've learned to build in time for not just one, but at least two and sometimes three rounds of copy editing, depending on how much the text has changed. Two rounds are the minimum because the process of ragging the text (on the layout) often introduces glitches that are not apparent beforehand. (By the time we're done, we will have gone through four rounds. The goal is to minimize if not eliminate changes while the books are on press.)