365 True Things: 6/Work

I have worked as a freelance copyeditor and proofreader since about 1984 or '85, mostly with the University of California Press. This "career" started because I was living in the East Bay near Berkeley. I was procrastinating mightily on working on my dissertation, having finished my two years of coursework at UCLA and finally moved north to be with my husband, who was studying engineering at UC Berkeley. I must have been perusing the UC Extension catalogue and seen a course listing for copyediting, taught by Marilyn Schwartz, managing editor of the Press. Because I've always been told what a good writer I am, I figured editing would be easy—and it would assuage my guilt over, well, not writing. Or not researching, as the case was at that point (and so remained for several years, but that's another story).

The class was fun. I found that I in fact do have a penchant for stickling little details, plus I'm pretty good at gauging how much interference a particular author needs. Or put another way, I had my own standard that my authors needed to rise to—but that's something I only found out over time, sometimes to my detriment. (Editing can be very time consuming, and that time is not necessarily always a good investment.) In any case, I did well in the class, and Marilyn pulled me aside at the end and suggested I take the Press's proofreading test. In those days, proofreading meant comparison proofreading: you'd get the typeset pages and the marked-up manuscript and make sure all the editing had been correctly transcribed by the typesetter. By working with the edited pages, I would learn more deeply how to approach an editing project.

So I did take the test, passed it, and I started proofreading. Pretty quickly, I was given my first editing job, which was sort of a hybrid beast, halfway between proofreading and actual editing: a revision of Don Gifford's Notes for Joyce: An Annotation of James Joyce's Ulysses, previously published by Dutton in 1974 (and now to be called Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses.) The manuscript consisted of carefully pasted snippets from the earlier edition, interspersed with new typewritten notes. The job involved teeny-tiny writing (I'm good at that too), and because it was a reference work, the quality of the prose wasn't an issue—though as I recall, Gifford's prose was just fine.

From those humble beginnings, I went on to edit, oh, hundreds of books. I used to receive them in the mail, months after I'd finished them, and for years I kept them. But eventually I realized they were only taking up valuable shelf space, so I jettisoned most of them (a used bookstore in Santa Cruz catering to the university crowd took them). But first I carefully sliced the dust covers (those that had them) and, if I was mentioned in the acknowledgments, the title and acknowledgments pages. Much less bulky. Eventually, I realized that I didn't care about even those clippings very much. And so, a couple of years ago, I used some of them to make a little book arts project: a flag book. (It's nice to know all that hard work was good for something!) The rest I burned in the fireplace. Yes I did.

And just today, a new job has arrived on my computer, editing being all done on-line now. I always feel a little more "honest" when I have a job in. Like I'm part of a well-oiled machine. This one is about a minimalist sculptor named Anne Truitt. I expect I'll learn something. I usually do.