Published to mark the Victorian Society of Editors’ thirty-fifth anniversary, At the Typeface is a collective portrait of Australian publishing from inside the machinery.

Its contributors write about copy-editing, proofreading, freelance work, reference systems, author–editor relations, publishing hierarchies and industry politics (hot goss).

There are pieces on editing bibliographies, surviving freelance life or negotiating with publishers sit beside memoirs of major Australian editors and publishers, arguments about gender and language, reports from industry bodies, and accounts of publishing’s less dignified daily rituals. Much of the pleasure comes from its tone: dry, exacting, collegial and occasionally mutinous. These are people professionally condemned to care about misplaced full stops, and therefore unusually alert to the larger structures hiding behind them.

It is also a useful piece of Australian book-history ephemera, preserving the working culture of editing before publishing became fully digitised and professionally atomised. For editors, writers, publishers and anyone interested in how books are actually made rather than mystically delivered by the muse.

Society of Editors (Victoria), 2005. Paperback. Inscribed “To Stefanie” and signed by editor Janet Mackenzie on the title page. Light shelfwear and minor creasing to covers; internally clean.