The tent for distributing Rotunda 2002 yearbooks sat filled with folded chairs instead of organized lines of students for pick-up Wednesday.

According to an e-mail sent to Student Media Company at 5:21 p.m. Tuesday from Taylor Publishing Company, “everything was a go” for prompt delivery Wednesday morning.

By 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, SMU was informed of problems at the plant. Consequently, Taylor failed to deliver the yearbooks by the 10 a.m. scheduled drop-off time, and SMU could not distribute books to students Wednesday.

“We feel very strongly that customer service is important, and we hate to disappoint our customers” said Mary Beth Bratcher, sales and marketing manager for The Daily Campus and Rotunda. “It was a human error, and it’s our goal to get those books in [students’] hands ASAP.”

That will happen Thursday and Friday. New covers were printed for the book and the books were bound Wednesday afternoon.

Bratcher said that in her eight years at SMU, she has never seen a problem like this.

As late as 2 p.m. Wednesday, Taylor was unable to pinpoint the exact problems that prevented delivery but linked them to binding issues. The books wouldn’t fit in the cover that had been printed for them.

“It’s like a size 12 woman trying to wear a size 10 dress,” said Jim Montgomery, Taylor sales representative to SMU.

Montgomery said problems couldn’t be foreseen, but anything can go wrong at the last minute.

“Everyone at Taylor Publishing Company regrets the inconvenience that we caused the SMU community,” said director of finishing Gary Thompson.

Covers are manufactured in advance using a spine-size calculator that factors the specified paper stock used for a book’s content. Thompson said occasionally a paper stock bulks on the “high” side, and the overall thickness of the book is therefore greater. Thompson added that when that bulking is multiplied by 352 pages, the size of the Rotunda, the cover was approximately one-quarter inch too small.

“Our goal now is to accommodate SMU and get the books here for the second day of distribution,” Montgomery said.

Taylor responded to the problem as a quality-control matter and chose to re-make the covers for the entire order rather than to deliver a cover that potentially could be defective.

Reprinting began Wednesday afternoon. The yearbooks are scheduled to be delivered from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Thursday and Friday by the flagpole.

In case of rain Thursday, yearbooks can be picked up on the main floor of Hughes-Trigg Student Center.