Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

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.

I got home just after 8 this evening; cattitude expressed surprise when I said "I came straight home from work." I was there until 7:15, making copies of corrected PDFs before they went back to the printer.

The only thing unusual about this was the timing, which was late because the design side of proofreading did a second pass after someone noticed how bad the contrast was on some of the illustrations. Other than that, the usual selection of minor fixes, things I caught by sheer chance because there was no special reason to even look at that line at this stage of proofs, and one significant catch in the latter category: we're reprinting the Gettysburg Address as part of the "Read Aloud Anthology", selections of stories, nonfiction, and poetry for teachers to read to their classes and discuss. (There's quite a bit of other good stuff in there; light-years above Dick and Jane.) I'm not sure why I actually looked at the text, but I did. Thus, I noticed an important missing word: "little," as in "men will little note nor long remember what we say here." I then went back to my desk, let Google take me to the Library of Congress's collection of Lincoln's papers, and printed out one of his drafts of the Gettysburg Address. I was right: "four score," two words, and "upon this continent," not "on."

All well and good, it will be fixed, and I'm pleased with myself--but it should have been caught sooner, except that it's far too easy to not actually see text that you know well.