From: Jasper
Date: 9/2/00
Time: 8:23:59 AM
Remote Name: 209.18.31.54
Pat, my good friend,
The more I look at the book the printer sent me (the one I'm sending to you) the more disappointed I am. There is a typo in the Acknowledgments that shouldn't be there because I know I corrected it in the final draft. That means there are probably other errors throughout the book that weren't corrected, either. No matter how hard you try some boogers are bound to end up in the finished product. You will find them in all of the O.J. books published by the big guys as well as the small publishers like Smartfellows Press. But this is different. I put a lot of hours into the final draft that have apparently gone down the toilet.
Something else that the printer didn't get right was the cover. The colors are supposed to be red, white and blue - for the American flag and for the unit patch I wore in Vietnam. The colors on the cover are red, white and purple.
It appears that someone also decided that the blood drop on the cover ahead of and to the left of the left bloody shoeprint was a blemish and took it out. Without it you don't have Fuhrman's bleeding killer theory or a reference to where any of those blood drops were actually located relative to a clear Silga (Bruno Magli Lorenzo) shoe print on the Bundy walkway.
Then there are the pictures in Chapters 30 and 31 that held everything up for months because of the poor contrast and resolution. I was willing to live with them if I had to to get the book out, but they weren't acceptable to the two representatives of the printer that I dealt with - two very good and conscientious people. One of these representative when the extra mile in getting the pictures done with first class quality but when I got the proofs back in June they were in the wrong place. I have been waiting all of this time for the top quality pictures to be put in the right place. What do you suppose happened? Somebody decided to use the same lower-quality pictures that where there before. Most of them are okay but none of them are what they should be.
Oh well. For people buying the book only for an investment, these flaws are going to make them more valuable because of the short run and the fact that there aren't going to be any more of them. But that's not going to do much for O.J. Simpson or Smartfellows Press. The better the quality the more they will sell themselves. One look at the cover without the blood dorp where it's supposed to be and the knowledgeable readers I'm trying to reach might just decide that I don't even know the basics.
Back to the drawing boards. --Jasper