I'm Editing The Worst History Book Ever

[Onasander]

I was told of location of a unpublished local history of my town going back to 1771, to the first settler, and can time it being written down to one of the Apollo Moon Walks, as the author decides to write about what he is seeing on TV....

 

Thats great, what is not great, is he invented his own form of punctuation, he uses periods, and your standard comma, and then this round thing that has the characteristics of both at times, is used immediately next to them, and sometimes on their own, being neither period or comma, but something else altogether..... doesn't seem to improve the English language to me. He managed to do this via a typewriter as well, which is most impressive..... as I never seen this symbol before.

 

Pages are missing.... but in impossible places, one page goes from 59, and on its backside 64.... on one piece of paper.... no place for that to get lost to....

 

My favorite is.... the guy thought he was a poet.... and threw a collection of bad poems in. So, some sort of obligation on my part makes me want to add a appendix.... but who could ever want to read some west virginian farmer and steel worker ramble on about his childhood?

 

And.... he took from other people's works..... big chunks of it, from other well known works.... he sources them, but clearly got them second hand, severely lowering the value.

 

The best part..... the invisible editor..... someone had this idea before, and left random editor notes.... built into the damn text, listing self as editor..... But now I too am the editor, so now everyone is going to be confused which editor is saying what.... and either the editor, a librarian, or the author drew lines like they were going to modify something.... who? How should I.... ME.... act on this? Was this the historians idea? Someone elses? Should I try to divine his intentions? Its like the guy had only learned compound sentence structure existed midway through the text....

 

Anyway..... this town has been written on by non-fiction historians and several novels, and a university in wisconsin specializes in our history (wisconsin is nowhere near west virginia)....

 

I am all confused. I got five pages up. 70 more or less to do.... building table of contents and index.

 

For a commentary.... Im lost. I cant tell the truth about it..... I found it in a disorganized bag from Macy's, and the bag was the favorite sitting place of a very finicky cat named Tiger, who had cataract surgery and hates me....

 

It also has a few other somewhat recent one page histories in it. So I can label it a 'Collection', "The Tiger History Collection".... and people will ask in a few hundred years why it is called that, completely lost to the fact this history was a cats nesting spot.

 

The libraries copy of a copy is barely readable now.... no use to anyone, falling apart.

 

Part of a page got peed on.

[Viggen]

...i would still find it exiting to read and work with such an old document...

 

are you a professional editor?

[Onasander]

No, but I have edited works in the past..... one of my hobbies is book making, I figured out how to make books in Iraq, via ripping up the very aweful books sent free to us in Iraq.... like 50 year old romance novels no one ever touched. I saw the inside of the spines.

 

I was also inspired by this website to do maps for a while.... on GIMP would take old maps from the library of congress maduson building, and redue the color scheme.... I couldnt shade the mountains right though.... so gave up on the idea pf doing a military atlas of history..... your stuff is better.

 

I had talks with the local library. Im going to donate my old industrial paper cutter to the library, and get a cheap perfect bound thermo glue machine so people can start making their own books, Ill have to show him how to buy ISBNs in bulk, and do the barcode.... but other than that, with some W2 Glossy paper for the cover, and each 11 by 8.5 paper = 4 book pages, its quite easy.

 

I also spend alot of time on the sixth floor of the san francisco library, they have a very rare rare books room dedicated to the history of book making, and also knew some historical book makers, and did security for a overly fancy french luxury store, who had a french repair guy on site to resew any damage to their silly $40,000 purses. I learned to sew leather watching him over a year.... little techniques in how you hold the needle....

 

So actual editing.... very simple task in comparison. Im a Cynic, we literally invented the Anthology. Its not a magical skillset, you just do it.... and you either succeed and fail, and if you fail, you do it again.