Problem Getting Manuscript through Customs

[Nora Favorov]

I am posting this for Christi Stanforth at Oxford U. Press, who finds
herself in an absurd situation with Russian customs and one of her authors'
manuscript.  Please reply directly to stanforthc at oup-usa.org (or if you
think your advice might interest the entire list, at least copy her).

Around the beginning of May I sent a copyedited ms. to an author who lives
in the States but is spending the summer in Moscow. Yesterday I learned that
when he tried to FedEx the reviewed ms. back to me, the Russian customs
officers said nyet: "First, they required me to fill in two declarations and
to submit two photocopies of my passport, which I did by coming to them
again. Then it was stopped for the second time. I went there again, this
time to talk with the person who is in charge of contacts with the customs.
She told me that the manuscript had to go through 'expertise' in order to
establish its 'cultural value,' 'authorship,' and if it 'carries no damage
to the Russian Federation.' [By the way, the ms. is on city government in
Hellenistic and Roman Asia Minor. Maybe he should have left the word
"government" out of the title, but otherwise its topic predates the Russian
Federation by a couple thousand years ] My attempts to explain that this was
my manuscript and that it posed no 'danger' to anybody's interests or rights
were totally in vain. Another problem is that nobody knows how and where
this 'expertise' can be done. And even if I find someone who would produce
such a 'document' for me, there is a good chance that the customs will turn
it down as not 'valid.' I am
also afraid that after the manuscript is submitted for this 'expertise,' it
can simply be lost; and, as usual, nobody will be held responsible.
Hopefully, I will manage to take the ms. out of the country: the same person
told me that, without the 'expertise,' it cannot be taken out of the country
in any way, i.e. including as a
part of my personal luggage. Under more normal circumstances, the manuscript
would have been edited on disk, so that I could just e-mail the author the
copyedited files and let him review them on disk and add/delete as necessary
using "track changes." But naturally, the only copyedited version of this
ms. is the hard copy in the author's possession. The ms. includes lots of
fairly complicated display material, including (oh, joy) line upon line of
Greek characters. That's why the copyeditor chose to do this one on paper
instead. So the idea of asking the author to learn redlining and add the
editor's changes AND his own, and then asking the typesetter to keyboard the
Greek from an earlier hard copy, makes me a bit nervous. Then again, I
suppose relying on sneaking the ms. out of the country in his luggage makes
the author a bit nervous. Any ideas?

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