Someone in England has finally taken responsibility for publishing a version of Jonathan Franzen‘s Freedom that was not the final version of the book. Well, sort of. Maybe better to say someone has assigned blame for the massive screw-up.

According to a report by Alastair Jamieson in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph, Harper Collins UK CEO Victoria Barnsley said it was a typsetter’s fault. Barnsley went on to say,

I’d like to apologise profusely to Jonathan, his readers and our customers that our first edition of Freedom does not reflect the author’s final corrected version of the novel …

We are doing everything in our power to reprint the book over the weekend and rush it out into the shops early next week.

I would urge readers to wait until then to buy the book, and we are, of course, very happy to replace any first edition copies that have been bought, with an updated edition as soon as it is available.

So she’s sorry it happened but it wasn’t her fault. Her statement nonetheless leaves out quite a bit.

For example, the company — which says there are 80,000 copies in print, but with only 8,000 sold so far — is apparently not taking the mis-printed books out of circulation, despite rumors Friday that there were plans to pulp them. Instead, as a Guardian report by Rowenna Davis and Alison Flood clarifies, “HarperCollins is not planning a full scale recall of the 80,000 hardback copies in bookshops for logistical reasons.” Of course, the “logistical reasons” so blithely undetailed are those of the publisher, not the retailers now left stocking a faulty product in massive numbers; nor, especially, the readers now left in something similar to a negative opt-out situation (whereby they have to call a special telephone number to get a replacement).

Also unobserved in the Guardian report: if the publisher is not recalling those 80,000 books, it is because it still intends to sell them.

Meanwhile, what the hell happened? According to the Guardian story, HarperCollins claims …

… the crucial mistake happened when a small Scottish typesetter, Palimpsest, sent “the last but one version” of the book file to the printers. Palimpsest was not available for comment.

“It was just a mistake that happened,” said Siobhan Kenny, director of communications for HarperCollins UK. “It’s too early to say whether action will be taken against the typesetters, but we will still use them. We just want to make sure that all the fans can read the correct version of the books as soon as possible,” she said.

Of course, the Guardian reporters and everyone else reporting on this is taking the explanation at face value. But that’s just lazy reporting, or more precisely non-reporting, because as anyone with the slightest knowledge of how publishing companies work — a book industry journalist, say — knows that this version of events still seems so highly unlikely as to indicate a cover-up. That is, only a much larger systemic breakdown at the publisher itself would allow for such a massive mistake.

For one thing, how did a typesetter — in this case an outsourced typesetter at that — come to have an earlier, uncorrected draft in the first place? Plus, typesetters would not have been the ones to send the files to the printer. They go back to the publisher, which then proofs them, sends them to the printer — and gets final proofs back for final inspection before telling the printer to pull the trigger. Yet no British journalist seems to find it questionable that an outsourced typesetter was allowed to have final word on one of the biggest books of the year.

So, what really happened seems still unclear. But meanwhile, it happened in Australia, too, according to a report in Bookseller and Publisher. And there, at least, the publisher is going to pulp its remaining copies.

Meanwhile, HarperCollins head Barnsley says “We are hugely appreciative of Jonathan’s patience and utter professionalism over this.”

Perhaps she had this report by Edd McCracken from Scotland’s The Herald in mind:

It was during a recording for BBC2’s Friday night Review Show that Franzen became aware that his book, Freedom, was full of spelling and grammatical mistakes and missing alterations he had made to the final draft.

Breaking off midway through reading a paragraph for the show he said: “I’m realising to my horror that there is a mistake here that was corrected early in the galleys and is still in the f**king hardcover of the book.”