Indexing in the early days: Part I
Several people have urged me to write about my early days in indexing. I guess I should.
I was called an editorial clerk — an important sounding title, I thought — when I got my first indexing assignment in 1972.  The Lawyers Co-operative Publishing Company, my employer of already two years, was compiling a general index to American Jurisprudence 2d. It was an index to the second edition of an encyclopedia of U.S. law, contained in more than 100 volumes.
Dozens of people were working on the Am Jur 2d index.  Almost all of them were lawyers.  Despite the size of the staff, the index took more than two years to finish. Each index entry was written or typed on a separate card and manually sorted.  If you were a lawyer, and therefore necessarily not a typist, you had a “girl” to do your typing for you.  The cards were stored in boxes, and the boxes were stored on shelves that lined both sides of a 30-foot hallway in the Indexing Department. As I remember that hallway, there must have been 150 or so boxes of cards.
My first job was to pull all the cards containing cross-references out of the boxes and “sort-back†the entries. “Sorting back†meant alphabetizing the cards, not by their main headings, but by the cross-references to which the main headings referred. This way the cards could be compared against the main headings to verify whether the cross-references were valid. (Not by me. As an editorial clerk I wasn’t ready for such esoteric endeavors. Cross-reference verifications were performed by even more important people called indexing specialists).  My second job was to file the cards back into the main index when the verification was done.
Even though I earned a reputation as a champion sorter-backer, it took me many days to pull and sort the cards, and many more to re-file them.
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