In the past, editors could mainly rely on their own judgments about the quality and potential saleability of a book. Now they have to spend many hours convincing colleagues in all departments of the soundness and marketability of their choices. This means they have rather less time actually to edit than they did 10 or 20 years ago. So books are rushed through the editorial process — grammar and punctuation are neglected due to a lazy “the author knows best” mentality and books don’t get proofed properly. Even the indices in academic titles can be all over the place.

One author who had been published in the 1960s went to see his publisher in the late 1990s and was dumbstruck to see that the editorial department was no longer a dozen-strong: it was now staffed by three. This is a result of the slow corporate downsizing of the editorial process, where the middle-ranking editors have been eased out. Today copy-editing and proofing are frequently delegated to freelancers and rigorous checks are not made.

Not surprisingly, mistakes blossom: early editions of one paperback had its author born in 1906, not 1960. More recently, in Ferdinand Mount’s memoir Cold Cream, “Trooping of the Colour” (instead of “Trooping the Colour”) went uncorrected by editor, copy-editor and proof reader. In another book the composer Anton Bruckner’s surname was spelt like Anita Brookner’s throughout. Such slips would be much less likely to get into print in the USA, where The New Yorker-style obsession with fact-checking ensures properly edited texts.

But the problems are not just caused by the pressures of time and the market. The lack of cultural knowledge throughout the trade is staggering. I know of one publisher’s assistant (now working as a foreign rights manager in a large conglomerate) who had never heard of CP Snow. She had a degree from Oxford. Another author went to meet his publicist to talk about his book, which touched on politics in the mid 20th century. “Profumo Affair?” asked the PR girl. “What’s that?”