I have never done this

In all my time working at P&C, I never made this mistake.*

I did make a few others, though, and I'm well aware of that sinking feeling that Mr. Brooker describes so well. It is pretty easy to do, though. You can have comfortably five or six different proof versions, from the first proofs through to the final to-the-press proofs, and even then it's possible to have someone be looking through the book at the last minute and discover that you've spelled the author's name wrong on the title page (it's happened!), so your file of "Final, final, no really final, book.pdf" is suddenly invalidated.

Actually, an entertaining part of this story has been the blame game going since Friday, as each of the parties involved tries to point the finger at someone else.
- Franzen himself initially blamed the printers: "They printed the wrong file."
- The printers (qutie fairly) pointed out that "we only printed the one file we got given guv'nor - and we're not responsible for the content". They blamed the publisher.
- The publisher, on receipt of this hot potato, smoothly and immediately tossed it across to the typesetters: "The typesetter passed the incorrect version of the text to the printer. It's nothing to do with us."

At this point, my sense of professionalism kicks in. At no point should the Production Manager ever sign off on something he's not seen. You don't just get a phone call from an outsourcing company saying "We've done the work, OK?" and say "Sure, good job guys, bung it over to the printer and tell them to run off a cool 80,000 copies, right?" instead of getting the file back, checking it, and passing it to the printer personally. And you know what? If you do, you deserve something like this to come and bit you in the arse. No matter who ends up copping the blame in the media, there is a Production Manager over at HarperCollins who will be feeling the burning glare of a thousand angry supervisors for the next wee while.

*: One of my first assistants did, though, but fortunately the mistake was deemed insufficiently awful for the book to be pulped. Thank goodness.