Puzzling

We indexers are a hardy species. We are almost all self-employed, which means we're good at working alone, and are self-motivated and organised. We work long hours when an indexing job comes in, including nights and weekends, to meet publishers' and authors' deadlines. We love our work. But despite this hardiness, we do need some care. We are still human. We can't work miracles. The following list addresses frequent grievances, and ways you can look after your indexers better. 1. We need you now! Don't contact us for a quote, and then expect us to be available that week. Many of us have work booked in advance, for months. We need advance notice. An exasperated indexer (me). We're pretty low key 2. It's going to be late ... When you give us a deadline for the delivery of a manuscript, we book it in to our work calendars. We often have many projects coming in, one after the other, and we schedule them accordingly. When you run late with deliver...

The latest book I've indexed is Born Bad, by James Boyce (Black Inc. Publishing). This is a fascinating book, tracing the history and impact of the idea of original sin, from its origin from St Augustine in the late 4th century, to the modern day. I highly recommend it! There were several points to make decisions about in this index (well, every index is a constant process of decision making, to be honest). Firstly were a bunch of medieval names, how are these treated? And the names of saints and popes? With names such as Friedrich the Wise , I used direct order for the entry (ie written as is, 'Friedrich the Wise'), not inverted (Wise, Friedrich the), as 'Wise' isn't a surname. The same goes for names such as Julian of Norwich ... 'Norwich' isn't a surname, so he appears in the index under J for Julian. With popes and saints, the way I treated these names (as there were a lot of them mentioned) was under their 'holy' names, wit...