Paranoia fuel

I'm not too decline-and-fallish about the state of copyediting in academic press books; after all, I own a book from the 1950s with the most...unique use of apostrophes I've ever seen.  (We're talking errors that even my undergraduates don't make.)  But now that I've almost entirely had to abandon reading fiction in favor of literary criticism (think: deadlines; White Rabbit, quotations from), my glums have increased exponentially.  Misspelled names! Misplaced modifiers! Missing punctuation! I've always thought of the copyeditors as one of the last lines of defense against myself, but as more and more publishers outsource copyediting (or just don't really do it), it's hard not to feel a little unprotected.  And, to be blunt, copyediting has usually been one of the gatekeeping methods used to separate professional publishing from its less-respectable siblings; it's hard to keep up that position if the copyediting is being done ineptly, no?