Editor & Proofreader Hats

Editing is the one job that is invisible when it goes well, and these hats are for the people who do it. The badges name the trade, COPY EDITOR and PROOFREADER, the two plainest titles of the trade. STET gets its own design because it is the profession's most dramatic word: Latin for let it stand, the mark an author uses to overrule an editor, which Seth Godin once boiled down to no drama, no explanation, simply stet. The comma line comes from an anecdote that has been pinned on both Oscar Wilde and Flaubert, about spending the morning putting a comma in and the afternoon taking it out. The attribution is disputed, so no one is named on the hat. I FOLLOW CHICAGO STYLE nods to the Chicago Manual of Style and to The Onion's satirical report of a bloody feud between adherents of AP and Chicago style. I PUNCH TYPOS IN THE FACE is a phrase already sold on editor merchandise, and it gets a second colorway here, as does the proofreader who reads everything twice twice. Mary Norris called her memoir of the trade Confessions of a Comma Queen, and these designs are in that confessional spirit. This is the editing profession, not the hobby of correcting strangers, which Grammar Nerd covers. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat. Pick one for the copy editor on your team, or for the writer whose manuscript they saved.