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Quicksilver Productions struggles with aspect error.
The 2008 edition of Jim Maynard's Celestial Guide and Astrologer's Handbook arrived from the printer late and with errors. Instead of celebrating the 35th year of publication of one of astrology's most popular annuals, the company is now struggling to get corrected calendars to its customers and adjusting prices for the defects. In this article Jim Maynard responds to a number of questions I asked him about the problem.
Last week Quicksilver Productions announced that they had found errors in the 2008 edition of their Celestial Guide and Pocket Astrologer. In both books the conjunction glyph had been systematically replaced by a square glyph. As a result, when looking at the transit listings for a date, if there was a square, you couldn't be sure whether the aspect really was a square or an erroneously printed conjunction. In addition, the ink color of the Celestial Guide was lighter than it should have been, making shaded areas (such as the retrograde areas of the ephemeris) hard to see.
The Celestial Influences wall calendar and the smaller Pocket Astrologer do not have these problems. But since the problems were significant for the other two formats, the retail price of the calendars was cut by $3.00 for the Celestial Guide and by $2.00 for the Pocket Astrologer. In addition, Quicksilver Productions is now providing an errata sheet that shows all the correct conjunctions in calendar format, making it fairly easy to identify the errant glyphs.
As a neighboring astrological business (Astro Numeric Service is only a few blocks away from Quicksilver Productions in Ashland, Oregon), and a retailer of the calendars, I have more than a passing personal interest in this situation. But even so, the Celestial Calendars have become a major institution in the astrological world. 2008 marks the 35th edition. Many of us have had used this standard reference for the entire time we have been involved in astrology. While not directly related to Astrocartography, it would be hard to find an Astrocartographer who was not aware of these calendars.
I asked Jim Maynard (owner and founder of Quicksilver Productions) a number of questions about the crisis and how the company was facing it:
When and how did you discover the problem?
We received our first shipment, the Pocket Astrologers and Celestial Guides - Spiral Bound on November 28th. We worked feverishly to ship out all orders that involved only the Pockets and Guides.
Exactly one week later, December 5th, we received the other calendars. We started shipping as much as we could---even working late into the night.
Late the next morning, Thursday December 6th, I received an email from a customer about the problem with the Guides.
Have there been any other years in the past when something similar happened?
We have never had anything quite like this happen before. The closest examples were probably only 2 to 3% as bad as this situation.
The previous worst two situations:
One year there was an error in the travel of one planet in the chart of Planetary Motion. I had overlooked chopping off the travel of Venus and it showed Venus traveling further than it did.
The other was in the mid-eighties. The Eastern Pocket Astrologer had the wrong page for the December ephemeris. The Pacific version was correct. The printing company had actually pulled the previous year's December page and inserted it into the new Eastern version.
Could reprinting the books have been a viable option?
That same day I contacted the company that printed the Astrologer's Datebook to get a cost for printing new versions of both the Datebook and the Guides. The problem was the time it would take---both the time to receive replacement copies and the my time to oversee the new printing and shipping. We decided it would be too wasteful to reprint.
Who were the people/distributors/stores/end users that you were most concerned about when crafting a solution to the problem?
Actually, we are still trying to "craft" a "solution".
My first response was for us to contact our distributors (who sell to book dealers) to ask them to stop selling both titles.
But, I would have to say that my utmost concern was for the individual users of our calendars.
While my assistant, Patty, was contacting the distributors, I marked the Guides and Datebooks on our web site as "Sold Out" so that no one would be ordering more until we could figure out how to handle the situation.
That first day I could hear employees on the phones with customers and realized many wanted to purchase the Guides and Datebooks anyway.
That was when we decided to sell them at a reduced rate. Concerned about users dealing with the mistakes with conjunctions, I then made an errata sheet. I did the corrections in the form of calendars to make it more visual. Looking at the errata sheets, the problems really don't seem to be such a big deal. It would be without the errata sheets.
Have you gotten much support, feedback, reaction from your distribution network regarding the problem and its solution?
Two of our distributors were very difficult. One has stated that they will not carry our calendars after this year. Our largest distributor has refused to sell any affected copies at all.
The other distributors have been far less explosive about the situation. I think their joy of finally being able to ship the other calendars had offset their ire over the problems with the Guides and Datebooks.
Book Dealers have been mostly supportive.
Individuals have been about 80/20 in that about 80% have been very understanding AND wanted the Guides/Datebooks anyway. About 20% no longer wanted those calendars. About 10% have been so angry as to lash out.
Any important lessons learned from this experience?
It is still so early in the process of dealing with such a big mess that I haven't really examined what I can learn from this at this point. We have been swamped with just trying to fill orders and working on methods of dealing with this.
Every day we have come up with new ideas.
At this point our top three thoughts on this are:
1. We must get the calendars done earlier so that if there are problems, there will be enough time to fix them.2. We need to simplify our lives. And,
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