“It was the kind of attention that makes any author roll over and lie on his back, purring, as if having his belly fur scratched.”

Those words are from an author who had written many books, but for the first time had had one professionally indexed.  Read the rest of his comments here.

Indexing in the Early Days: Part II

How different my life would have been if I had taken the job of “gatherer,” the other opening for people with my experience (none) and skills (none) at The Lawyers Co-operative Publishing Company in the summer of 1970.   The reason I didn’t was because I didn’t know what a gatherer was.  But then I didn’t know what an editorial clerk or an indexer was either.

In 1970, the factory at my company was in the same building as the offices. The business of making books was a laborious and painstaking process that took enormous numbers of people. The factory in this video looks a lot like the one in our building.  It includes people with jobs like linotype operators, pressmen, and even gatherers.

VIDEO: How Books Were Made

See also:

Indexing in the Early Days: Part I

Indexing in the Early Days: Part III

Advice for freelancers

From Dr. Freelance’s Freelance Forecast:

Q:  If you could give ONE piece of advice to someone starting out or considering becoming a freelancer, what would it be? 

A:  With nearly 500 responses, space prohibits listing them all here, but they break roughly into the following categories:

1. Go for it/be optimistic/be tenacious.
2. Be ready to work hard and occasionally long hours.
3. Save money before you launch and during your freelance career in order to survive rough patches, pay taxes, healthcare, etc. (Common recommendation is from 6-12 months of living expenses in the bank.)
4. Be patient—it can take months or even years before you get steady work.
5. Trust your gut.
6. Treat it like a business: Have a plan, be professional, reliable, hit every deadline, and deliver what you promise.
7. Network/market constantly.
8. Roughly an even split between “take the leap” and “don’t quit your day job till you’ve established a client base.”
9. Don’t underprice yourself or undervalue your skills.
10. Be flexible. (Or, as one person put it, “Surrender to serendipity!”)
11. There were numerous responses to the effect of “Don’t do it,” “Don’t do it in this economy,” or “Think again.” (We’ll leave it to the readership to determine why someone might have that opinion—whether they’re honestly miserable or trying to discourage competition…)
12. Roughly even split between “find a niche” and “diversify yourself.”
13. Avoid isolating yourself.  Join networking groups, professional associations, find a mentor, etc.
14. Learn to turn off email, phone, social networking.
15. And finally, one respondent had the following thought, worth reprinting in full:

You have to know going into freelancing that you’re working in an environment where if anything goes wrong there’s no one to blame but yourself, and if anything goes right there’s no one to praise you but yourself. If you thrive in that kind of environment, then you probably have a chance at long-term success. If you need praise and attention, you’ll starve for it. So first be honest with yourself.

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.

See also:

Indexing in the Early Days: Part II

Indexing in the Early Days: Part III

Access is a privilege

There is a divide between those with and without the privilege of access:

In An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, Taryn Simon compiles an inventory of what lies hidden and out-of-view within the borders of the United States. She examines a culture through documentation of subjects from domains including: science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature, security, and religion. Confronting the divide between those with and without the privilege of access, Simon’s collection reflects and reveals that which is integral to America’s foundation, mythology and daily functioning.

Check out the images on Taryn Simon’s website. (And please buy me this book for Christmas).

Don’t talk phony-baloney

‘To gift’ is not a verb. (As in, “Bill Gates gifted the organization with a generous check”).

‘To parent” is not a verb.  (As in, “Florence parented her naughty children with consistent firmness”).

‘To dialog’ is not a verb. (As in, “Let’s dialog about proposed features of the new mousetrap”).

‘To liaise’ is not a verb. (As in, “Please have Elroy liaise with the designers regarding schedule changes”).

“Which book should I buy?”

A guy called Jared Spool studied how people make that choice.

Spool, a usability expert who lectures around the world, studied people browsing through bookstores.  Observing how people determine what a book is about, Spool found that approximately half turn to the back of the book and review the index.  More here.

“Which book is worthy of my time?” is a variation on this theme.  That question has also been answered by reviewing the index.  More here.

Responsible parenting

Information that cannot be found …

… might as well not exist.”    ~ Nancy Mulvany

More stuff I index

In July of 2007 the Guardian newspaper in the UK reported the case of a Muslim

woman juror who had been discharged from a murder trial after she was caught

listening to her iPod, concealed under her hijab, during important prosecution

evidence. The judge had heard traces of “tinny music” throughout the trial but

thought that it must have been either his imagination or a defect of his own hearing.

The woman juror was subsequently charged with contempt of court.