The Biography of Things

My desk on August 9, 2022

I think of the manuscripts I edit as scruffy children who need to be cleaned up and dressed in their Sunday best. I started freelance copyediting for Oxford University Press in 1987 when I was a graduate student. At that time, we edited on paper, using red fine-liner pens. Neat, legible handwriting was essential. When portions of the text needed to be moved, we actually cut up the pages and pasted them onto blank pages for insertion, hence the scissors and tape, which I seldom use now. There were no budgets or deadlines; we were instructed to do whatever was necessary to make the book correct. I worked directly with the author and received a complimentary copy of the book when it was published.

Tools of the Trade

Today the manuscripts are sent to me electronically from a production manager in India. I have no contact with either the press or the author and do not receive a copy of the printed book. On the day of this picture, I was working on a reference book with 300 separate files. In the spiral notebook to the left, I listed all the files and their word counts because that determines what I am paid (not the actual time spent on editing). I check off the files as I finish them and use that to determine if I am on track to meet the deadline. The deadlines are tight, so I often eat at my desk and keep working. I have two style guides on my desk (The Chicago Manual of Style and the APA Manual). The author has used a hybrid of the two styles, and I was instructed to make her hybrid style consistent rather than going with one style or the other. Although I know the rules of the previous editions of the style books, when the manuals are updated, I have to check to make sure the rules have not changed.

Gifts

Most of the things in this picture were gifts. The table, chairs, flowering fruit bowl, and desk lamp were left with me when my Taiwanese housemate, Ying-Chun, took a post-doc position halfway across the country. The colorful, Bolivian tablecloth was a gift from my daughter, Helyn, who traveled through North and South America with her friends. The flowers pictured on the computer wallpaper and the Therm Pro temperature and humidity gauge were gifts from my son, Byron. His girlfriend, Juliette, gave me the homemade Clove Leaf scented candle in the jam jar. She also gave me a box of four 100% soy scented candles (the top box).

Souvenirs

The oriental carpet mouse pad is a souvenir from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In 2017, I was in New York with a gospel choir from Wisconsin. We had a bit of free time for sightseeing between performances.

On our way to a performance at Riverside Church, New York City, 2017

The other souvenir is the quill pen from Plimouth Plantation, the recreated 1627 English village and Wampanoag homesite in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It was my only “in real life” outing with my long-term World of Warcraft mate, Scott, aka Cape Cod Santa. We began playing for an hour a day, early in the morning before our children got up and the workday started. We levelled our toons together at a leisurely pace, with interruptions to get more coffee (and apple cider doughnuts) or to take the dog out. It took us eight years to get to level 80 (to be fair, level 80 did not exist when we started). One Friday in December, he said that he had several Santa gigs over the weekend and that he would see me on Monday. But on Monday, he failed to show up for the first time since we had started playing. He had passed away, and though I had resurrected him many times in the game when he died, real life doesn’t work that way. On the last day we played, we sat on the beach at Darkshore. He was consoling me because my dog had died, and we remembered his parrot Cooky who had dropped dead off her perch a few years earlier.

Mysterious Things

The yellowed Shopko matchbox must have been kicking around for years and still has 23 of the 250 matches left. These may be vintage matches now that Shopko closed their stores in 2019. The strange thing about the matches is that I have never shopped at Shopko. I have no idea where these matches came from or how they ended up in my possession.

I am reminded of the love poem in the film Paterson (2016) that I saw at my friend Kathy’s house, and I remember that Cape Cod Santa was also a bus driver like the protagonist.

We have plenty of matches in our house

We keep them on hand always

Currently our favorite brand is Ohio Blue Tip . . . so sober and furious

And stubbornly ready to burst into flame.

This brings me to the strawberry-and-cream colored box with references to the Paris World Fair of 1889. It looks vintage though it is not. When I look at things, I see their use not what their name says they are. I do not see the beautiful box. I see a stand for my laptop that brings up it to eye level when I am working on a Wacom tablet. What’s in the box? I have no idea; it has not been opened in years.

It’s my son’s old computer games that I bought for him at GameStop back in the 2000s!

As a copyeditor, I work alone at home. But at my desk, there are also memories of Ying-Chun, Helyn, Byron, Juliette, Kathy, Cape Cod Santa, and a mysterious unknown person who may return someday to claim the matches.

Where Are They Now?

Most of the things on my desk are en route to England. The APA Style Guide was donated to the Friends of McFarland Library, the table and chairs are going to Habitat for Humanity, the desk lamp was given to Siobhan, and the flowers that my son gave me (pictured as the background on my computer) are now dried.

My desk on January 21, 2023

About the Copyeditor

Dr. Lynn Childress writes A Delicate Bloom of Learning.