I have now been Publishing Assistant at JMP for five and a half weeks. Excepting my three-leg, hour and a half-long, twice daily commute between Moortown and Lindley, however, it doesn't seem like it. This is probably because of the sheer variety of the work that I've done since arriving here which, as well as making it enjoyable, serves as my excuse for the steady stream of mistakes that follows me around like an aura. As it happens, I have not actually been sent by a rival company to sabotage this one but, judging by the number of errors I've made in processing book orders, this may seem surprising.
However, Yorkshire Sculpture Park has been the client for which I've done the largest single chunk of work so far. I say 'single chunk' - it's really been more of a cluster of granules squeezed together. I've done all sorts of work for our marketing and distribution agreement with the park: written the blurbs for the YSP titles on our website; submitted information to Nielsen Bookdata about the books; contacted art galleries in the hope of persuading them to buy books that are relevant to their exhibitions; and uploaded the books onto the JMP site. The first of these proved a stern test of my reserves of adjectives, but I think I coped all right.
I also did the OCR checking for a book
, which was the main editorial project that I've had to date. This task demanded speed as well as care, since I had to spot barely visible errors caused in the scanning process, like commas that had been rendered as semicolons because of specks of dust on the page. The highlight of the experience was probably the satisfaction that I gained from noticing that the original text had rendered the phrase 'dead-bolt' differently on two consecutive pages (once with a hyphen and once without). You might suspect that I am being sarcastic in describing this as a 'highlight'. If so, you suspect wrongly: aspiring editors are desensitised to irony where grammatical rigour is concerned. Indeed, the burst of pride that I felt upon telling the client that I had corrected the error in my subsequent letter suggests to me that my incipient desire to be an editor has at least some basis in self-awareness.
In the past couple of weeks, packaging books has become more prominent in my timetable. In large part, this has been due to the enormous demand for copies of Chris Woodward's book
The London Palladium. On one occasion, I packaged thirty-five copies of the book to send in one go. Doing book orders tends to mean hectic finishes to my days, partly because I always underestimate the amount of time I need to package books, and no doubt many locals wonder why there is a smartly dressed young man staggering across the village underneath a pile of cardboard boxes every day. But each day ends with a feeling of slight heroism at the knowledge that I have got the post to the post office on time.
Despite the commute, I like working here. (By 'here', I mean both the office and the village.) To someone who is used to the feverish pace of life in Leeds and the instances of foot fury (the pedestrian equivalent of road rage) that you see whenever you're in the vicinity of the station, it feels therapeutic to be working in an office with four other people in a village that doesn't seem to have changed since the 1950s. The whole atmosphere of Lindley is embodied in the fact that it has two lollipop wielders: one at either end of Lidget Street which, if the label is applied slackly, is the high street.
A similar calm pervades the office. Normally, there are only three of us on the ground floor. This is useful for me whenever I need to ask Hazel to correct one of my mistakes. It is probably a less desirable arrangement for Hazel. There are, however, some more evenly apportioned benefits. There's little danger of information getting lost or misinterpreted in the corridors of a gangly bureaucracy, for example. I know that every school/university/workplace/pub/recreational society/town in the country likes to think of itself as 'friendly', but the atmosphere in our office genuinely evokes the word.
