LIKE MANY OTHER PROFESSions, the book trade is keen on jargon: lots of it, and the more the merrier. As with those other professions, it tends to be of two kinds: outward-facing — when publishers communicate with their customers — and inward-facing, when they communicate with other publishers or the people who write the products they sell.
Its function — the function of all professional jargon, it might be said — is simultaneously to create an easily intelligible code for the benefit of insiders and (frankly) to
