Illinois. Photo: Roadside America
New York. Photo: Gadling.com
You’d want the earth to open up and swallow you if you’d worked in any editorial capacity at Knopf on The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America. Woodstock is possibly the most famous town in the area, but the authors seem to have mixed it up with Woodstock, Illinois, and have published all sorts of details about the Illinois burg as if it were in New York’s green and pleasant land. The Digital Reader, having examined the files of The Woodstock Independent (a much-used source in the book, but unfortunately from the wrong state) exposes the devastating facts.
Woodstock, Illinois’ claim to fame is that it was the location used for the exterior shots in the movie Groundhog Day. That notwithstanding, it is of course rather unlikely that any poor editor working away lickety-split on their latest Knopf freelance job could be expected to realize that the descriptions were not of businesses or even streets in the right Woodstock. We all know that there’s no way anyone at a book publisher’s is going to go in for fact-checking, and call the local chamber of commerce. We just don’t have the budget for such things. No, we rely on the authors to get it right. To them the embarrassment appropriately belongs. Maybe the fact that one of them is a filmmaker might have sensitized him to the Groundhog Day connection.
Making Book 
Based on what I can find about the authors, I strongly suspect they wrote this book under contract for a fixed fee. Neither is a professional author, historian, researcher, or expert on the region, and in fact I don’t see why either should have written this book in the first place.
In short, it looks like Knopf outsourced every part of the process of publishing this book.
But I could be wrong, so I’ll go ask the authors and Knopf.
No, I screwed up on this one. Silverman is a pro author.
Thanks for your response(s). I’m not sure it makes much difference — either way the author ends up being the one “responsible” for the accuracy of the facts in the text. Their contract probably includes a clause indemnifying the publisher against errors and libels.
Also, I’m not sure it would make a difference whether Knopf freelanced out all or part of the editorial work. Unless by chance they picked an editor who happened know Woodstock, it’s unlikely any publisher would pick up on such errors of fact. The New Yorker magazine is justly recognized for its fact-checking, and this recognition is emphatically in contrast with most other media, who do none.
It is perhaps surprising not so much that errors like this happen, but that they don’t happen more often. Clearly if you are rushing your work, as you would tend to do in a fixed fee situation, such mistakes are understandable.
It will be interesting to see what Knopf does with the book.
[…] See also Fact checking from 2014. Also relevant is Error embarrassment. […]