Today I am an indexer

[redbird]

I'm not actually doing the serious work of indexing, namely figuring out what needs to be listed in the index and under what headings.

What I'm doing is fixing every single page number in this index. Having gone through the book itself--a large-format, simple atlas for 5-9-year-olds--and marked a few things I'd like changed, I almost skipped the index. But I am thorough about these things, so I spot-checked [1]. The spots I checked were wrong, so I checked some more entries. Also wrong, consistently so: it looks as though two pages were slipped in late in production, after the index was created; the page numbers in the table of contents are right, at least.

So I have been playing with photocopiers, scissors, and tape, to get copies of a suitable size to mark up and reproduce. And now I will get to write lots and lots of corrected page numbers on my copies.

[1] For large values of "spot": Africa and Asia.

Comments

[calimac.livejournal.com]

That'd be nice. I have rarely used an index which didn't have errors. Might as well talk about that in my next post.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Oh, my co-worker (our managing editor) would love you. She's a stickler for indexing, and claims to actually enjoy doing it. She thinks of it as the dessert after finishing a satisfying "meal" of book editing.

[rdkeir.livejournal.com]

"Blessed are the indexers, for they shall lead us to the right page."

-- The Sermon on the Muont