Okay, first off, here are the last two books I’ll ever index:
These happen also to be the only two books I’ve indexed. Professional indexers are special people, and I am not that kind of special.
Trivia:
- Appeal to Reason, most of which I also typeset and the copyediting of which I supervised, had the cleanest manuscript I’ve ever seen, before or since. I kept saying, “We ought to send Craig [the editor] flowers.” We never did, but we did gush praise at him every time we spoke.
- The manuscript for the History of African American Theatre was about seven inches high, and it was being copyedited while I wrote the index. Which meant that I had to look up which of the zillions of variants of all those titles and proper names and so forth were correct, and then e-mail them to the copyeditor. It was kind of insane; I thought I might die; I nearly died. The published index is forty-three pages, typeset. Also, I really don’t recommend compiling a large index using Excel. On the bright side, having obsessively fact-checked the index myself, I can now place reasonable trust in it as a fact-checking resource—I look up play titles and actors’ names in it all the time.
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