F for Frustrating.

Last week I said I hoped that Thursdays on this blog would be Fiction Thursday, where I could run some new or recycled stories for your reading pleasure, or something. I have barely been able to think creatively or in fact in any other way because all my brain cells have been taken up with

INDEXING

Everyone knows that Copy Editors like your obedient servant here are pretty geeky, but indexers are geeks' geeks. It is a highly specialized skill within the field. It's like the open-heart surgery of editing; sure, every editor knows the theory, but few would want to have to stick their hands in there and take a whack at it.

Plus, it's boring as hell.

On the surface it seems very simple. Take your nonfiction book, note all the bits of information on each page with the page number, run it through Word's alphabetizing thingie, and break for lunch. In fact, Word even has an indexing feature, so you can just go down the document and flag key words for the index, and Word will spit it out at the back. Easy Peasy Lemonade Squeezy, or as the indexers say:

Easy
Lemonade
Peasy
Squeezy

HA! Shows what you know.

The chapter on indexing in the Copy Cats' scripture, The Chicago Manual of Style (new 17th edition!), is 51 pages long. That's a lot of pages to tell you how to compile an adequate index. Here's one chosen at random:

The thing is, indexing involves a lot more than knowing that A comes before B; it requires cross-referencing, subreferences, a knowledge of how to alphabetize names and foreign words, and whether numbers are listed before or after letters or spelled out and alphabetized as letters. In fact, before you even go that far, you need to know how the publisher alphabetizes. Yes, there's more than one method. Do you alphabetize word-by-word or letter-by-letter? In the latter, pear comes before pea soup; in the former, pea soup comes first.

As for those names, you may have to look every one of them up -- Carl Van Vechten, author of Spider Boy (1928), and Vincent van Gogh, the painter, are not alphabetized the same way. They are:

Gogh, Vincent van
Van Vechten, Carl

Why? Because Webster's New Biographical Dictionary says so. Even though Vincent is called Van Gogh and not just Gogh. You just have to look them up. And don't even think about the Chinese or Japanese names, or worst of all, those Spanish names where every freaking family member gets a hand in, like "Carla Rodriguez Hermena Calderón de García." Where's the last name? Better look it up. If a foreign title is mixed in, you may not realize where the name ends and the title begins. If the person is known by a nom de guerre or something (Il Duce, Abu Mazen, La Grenouille Frénétique), do you list him under that, just add it to the name, do a separate entry, or just a cross-reference ("Verrückter Karl -- see under Von Hoopenschmactchter, Karl")? It is difficult, demanding, and yet still boring.

So what happened was, a friend of mine I do some work for asked me to give a thorough check to an index. As it happened, the deadline was very short and I had an appointment that day, so with great regret I had to pass on the assignment. 😅 A few days later he sent me a note and said, Guess what? We got an extension! Here it is! 😭 So that was my week.

All I had to do was check every single reference on the index, just to make sure the page numbers were correct. I didn't have to actually compile the thing. But it reminded me that indexers really are in a class by themselves. I salute you, indexers! No one gives you the credit you deserve.