A glorious thread, which reminds me of our fire inspection at an independent publishers.https://twitter.com/Sotherans/status/1223193563867045888 …
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This was in a very tall thin town house in a mews off Kensington High St. It had about two rooms per floor, four floors, one staircase. This was back in the days of paper. The production manager was the 'save everything' type.
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Aside from all the other paper we had full copies of the edit, proof, and production copies of each MS, which had to be keps apparently indefinitely. If you do 80+ books a year that mounts up. We'd ran out of filing space years back. We ran out of shelves.
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The one door to a fire escape was blocked by a double stacked pile of paper five feet high. if there was a horizontal surface to put paper on or a vertical surface to lean it against, it had paper.
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Shortly after I started there, someone started storing MSS on the stairs. Just, neatly stacked MS to the right hand side, going up between the second and third floors. Then double stacking.
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Quite soon the paper was higher than the steps, and the remaining stair space was about a metre wide. i remember the day I saw a MS appear on the left hand side of the stairs and thought, "...oh dear."
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Did I mention in those days you could still smoke in offices? Or at least, we did. It was nominally no smoking but the boss was a heavy smoker and on Friday nights we'd get pissed and smoke in the third floor of this, not to put a fine point on it, death trap.
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Anyway, one Monday we hadn't cleared up. Overflowing ashtrays, bleary eyes. I picked my way through the Paper Gorge that used to be stairs, and the phone rang. It was the receptionist. "FIRE INSPECTOR. ON HIS WAY UP. HIDE THE FUCKING ASHTRAYS."
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Oh boy was that a day. Never throw a full ashtray into a desk drawer, that's my advice.
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It ended with the fire inspector and the boss having a literal shouting match--faced off and full throated bellowing--as the boss yelled THIS IS A PUBLISHER and the fire inspector screamed I DON'T CARE! GET RID OF ALL THE PAPER! ALL OF IT!!! I think we cleared the stairs.
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