The persistence of memory.
Or not.
Some days working in publishing feels as surreal as a Dali painting.
The biggest disjoint contributing the melting of the landscape is how one forgets books. I can design a book, really get my hands in the text (as it were), and two weeks later I couldn't tell you the title or the author or what typeface I used.
When I first started in the industry, I had to collate all the production invoices for all our titles. I could tell you how much it cost to print, do color separations, typesetting--everything!--on every individual title. From memory. Sometimes I even knew the ISBNs.
After about a year of that, I think my brain figured out that this was unnecessary and started dumping everything it knew about a title as soon as the book was printed and in the warehouse. (This forgetting was abetted by there being books with very similar titles, and authors who had extensive backlists. I couldn't name a JA Jance title now if you held a gun to my head. Woman's a bestseller and everything.)
And now, 20 years later, my brain doesn't even hold onto that much. It knows I can look things up in the database, or do a search for every email discussing a particular book. I just processed a typesetting invoice for a book that I have no recollection of. But these are the interactions I've had with the book:
1. Participated in the meeting (5 people) where we debated whether to publish the book or not.
2. Assigned a managing editor to the book, and scheduled it for transmittal.
3. Did the castoff for the book and participated in the transmittal meeting.
4. Received an email from my trafficing person every time the book moved between my department and the typesetter, right up to "This book is complete and I'm ordering the files for the printer."
And still the typesetting invoice comes in a week later and I'm like, "Is this our book? What is this?"
Granted, this book seems to have sailed through the process without any glitches, which materially contributes to it not appearing on my personal radar in any memorable way. I do tend to remember the "trouble" books, at least for a while.