Launching the register of freelance editors
Seeing the 'Treasures' in style
Wanted: A VP
Treasures from the World's Great Libraries
Letter to the editor
The President's column
By the way
New members
Tanka anyone?
Time to smile
Training news
Dates for your diary
Copyright information
Join in the gala on Wednesday 27 March as Pam Peters launches the society's seventh print edition of the Canberra Society of Editors' Register of Freelance Editors.
Pam Peters is Director of the Style Council Centre at Macquarie University, and Director of Dictionary Research for The Macquarie Dictionary. She is the author of The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide, and edits Australian Style, the newsletter or bulletin that is sent, free, to many or all of our members. These publications are definitive guides to the use of English in Australia, so how appropriate that Pam Peters will be the one to 'break the champagne' on this occasion.
This is the first time the society has had an official launch of the register, and it is expected to be a felicitous event, with guests from related branches of publishing, client organisations and representatives of the media.
So, see you at the Friends' Lounge of the National Library of Australia, at 6 for 6. 30 pm, for refreshments and networking, followed by the meeting and Pam Peters's talk and the launch, and then more networking and refreshments. Dinner after the launch will be at Vivaldi restaurant at ANU.
Members of the society who were able to book a place before the society's quota of space was full, were fascinated to listen to Margaret Dent, curator of the exhibition called 'Treasures from the World's Great Libraries', at the February meeting. In this, the first of two articles about the meeting, Alexa McLaughlin shares with us anecdotes from Margaret's talk. The second part of the evening was a visit to the exhibits themselves, which are described by Sylvia Marchant later in this issue.
When arrangements were made for society members to view the exhibition, 'Treasures from the World's Great Libraries', in its final week, the gallery at the National Library of Australia was intended to be closed to the public at 6 pm each day, so we would have had it to ourselves. By 20 February, the exhibition was only closing for about one hour per day (around 4-5 am) for the room to be cleaned, and hopeful 'punters' (in this case, exhibition visitors) were queuing in the cold and dark (and sometimes wet) for hours to secure a ticket for later that day, if they were lucky. We, on the other hand, already had our tickets booked. Beforehand, we were able to enjoy Jenny Cook's delightful finger food, and chat amongst ourselves in the Friends' Lounge, and hear about the exhibition from the curator, Margaret Dent. We were truly privileged.
The exhibition was designed to celebrate the National Library's centenary, and also to celebrate libraries everywhere. From its inception as the Parliamentary Library, the National Library of Australia had collected widely with a view to the contemporary needs as well the future. It became independent of the Parliamentary Library in 1960.
Margaret found it enthralling to decide which items to ask for from libraries all around the world. She shared her 'wish list' with others, who helped her locate a Dead Sea Scroll and helped organise the travel of items. There was a momentum about agreements - the promise of loan of a Gutenberg Bible helped other libraries to agree to get 'in on the act' and promise their own treasures.
When Margaret and colleagues were searching for a modern CD recording of a Bessie Smith phonograph recording in the exhibition, a radio request from 2CN's David Kilby elicited an offer from Wayne of Gunning within minutes. This truly brought us the past through present technology - radio and CD.
The exhibition was able to use Art Indemnity Australia, underwritten by the Federal Government, to provide insurance cover, which would otherwise have been prohibitively expensive.
The designer for the exhibits was an architect and Margaret and her staff feel this worked very effectively. Many citizens do not know of the wide range of materials held in library collections around the world and this exhibition honoured this variety.
Margaret emphasised that these were original items, not facsimiles. Some moved people to tears. For example, one much appreciated and moving exhibit was the Warsaw telephone book, prepared before the Holocaust. Some visitors were delighted to find the names of relatives on the pages at which it was open! A copy of the book has been made and is available for searching.
Margaret, like myself, was especially interested in the literary manuscripts, and seeing how they changed and developed. Some were hard to read, because of the tiny handwriting and because we could not hold them. Those items shown on the web site are much easier to read. Margaret was delighted with the success of the exhibition, which had appealed to a wide range of people. Visits lasted one-and-a-half hours on average, which is much longer than has been experienced at other exhibitions, here or overseas. One visitor was said to have been in the exhibition for nine hours - and there were no pass-outs!
The exhibition closed on 24 February and over 115, 000 persons had visited it. Many items are shown online at <http://www.nla.gov.au/worldtreasures/index.html>. There is also a catalogue available from the library bookshop. People came from all over Australia and some from overseas for this very special exhibition. What a treat that it was in our city and that we got to see it in such style.
Our appreciation and grateful thanks to Margaret Dent for bringing life to the behind-the-scenes stories, and also to our former president, Lee Kirwan, who arranged our tour, letting us avoid the queues.
Alexa McLaughlin
One of the less demanding positions on the committee of our society is that of vice-president, a position which is currently vacant and must be filled for the good of the society. Selection criteria: full member of the society, commitment to the profession, enthusiasm, willingness to help and stand in for the president, capacity to attend the committee meeting and general meeting each month. How about it? If you're interested, please contact Ed Highley.
The title promised much and the reality did not disappoint. From the moment you entered the National Library's Exhibition Gallery with its muted atmosphere and soft lighting, a sense of awe and wonder was palpable. It was not so much that the exhibits were grandiose, imposing, or huge, though many of them were brilliantly colourful, but more that they speak so eloquently of the endeavours and achievements of humankind. The range of exhibits was breathtaking, beginning with the dawn of writing, represented here by the cuneiform script on the Nebuchadnezzar clay cylinder dating from 630-562 BCE and the Book of the Dead in Egyptian hieroglyphics dating from 1991-1633 BCE. Then there was the Gutenberg Bible from the world's first printing press, printed in 1455, and, from more recent times, the papers of Eddie Mabo, dating from 1892 to 1992. (For dating purposes the Library has now adopted the modern terms for eras and BCE replaces BC and CE replaces AD, where CE stands for 'common era'. )
The exhibition statistics are staggering. Over 150 treasures from more than 35 major libraries in over 20 countries were displayed. They covered centuries of recorded history from the 19th century BCE to the 20th century CE. There were maps, paintings, manuscripts, music and personal possessions, all of which have played a defining role in the evolution and development of human culture across the globe since time immemorial. The collection, which was representative rather than encyclopedic, drew on a wide range of themes to illustrate the emergence and development of culture and knowledge in modern societies. The themes were:
Recording and preserving knowledge,
Exploring our world,
Scientific thought and development,
Religion and values,
Defining society,
Literature and creativity,
Music.
Each theme had a chronological flow taking the viewer from the earliest times up to the present era. Thus, we had the very ancient and curious inscribed oracle bones from China, the awe-inspiring ten commandments from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the stately beauty of the Gutenberg Bible. In exploring the world we were presented with a plethora of maps demonstrating the astonishing skills of the mapmakers. Here we found Ptolemy's Cosmographia (1478) complemented by the colour, beauty and artistic sensibility of a variety of panoramic maps which used pictorial techniques to represent place.
Bold colour was also a feature in the illustrations of the dazzling and fearsome array of figures from the Chinese opera, and in the lively and colourful illustration in a Japanese military textbook showing armour-clad warriors in a fierce attack in a famous battle. The stylised drawings of animals in the English Bestiary were another visual delight as well as inviting wonder at the imagination and application of knowledge. Colours glowed in the several Books of Hours, in illuminated letters in the 13th century Glorious Antiphonal music score, and Toyokuni III's Junitsuki no uchi a Japanese woodblock print showing Japanese life in the 19th century, and many, many more.
Less colourful but still extraordinary were manuscripts of examples of scientific development such as an Arabic translation of the Elementa of Euclid (c. 325 - c. 265 BCE), pages from Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Einstein's theory of relativity and Bell's drawings of the telephone, to mention only a few. They demonstrated the amazing inventiveness and imagination of their creators. Also jostling for attention were such delights as original manuscripts of celebrated writers such as Dickens, Austen and Bronte, again to mention only a few, highlighting the creative and literary aspects of development.
But it was not all serious learned stuff, and after all, why should it have been? Life is not like that. Among the exhibits were curiosities that reflect on societies, attitudes and on personal lives, revealing fascinating quirks of humanity such as the Tulipomania frenzy that swept Holland in the 17th century, driving the price of tulip bulbs, of all things, up to dizzy heights, and showing that greed is not new. There was Charles Dickens's folding cutlery set of steel and bone, which he used on his extensive US lecture tours. One wonders how, and indeed why, he ate with the tiny utensils; did he indulge in 19th century versions of take away food to eat in his hotel room?
Then there was a beautiful Collector's chest, elaborately ornamented and ingeniously constructed to house a varied assemblage of objects which could be both stored and viewed without disturbance. One was a chained book (seriously, books were often chained to shelves in libraries in the Middle Ages because they were still rare and expensive and tempting to the unscrupulous reader). The example in the exhibition was accompanied by this biting inscription:
The thievish disposition of some that enter into libraries to learn no good there, hath made it necessary to secure the innocent books, even the Sacred volumes themselves, with chains which were better deserved by those persons, who have too much learning to be hanged, and too little to be honest.
These were forerunners of today's elaborate electronic scanning devices, to ensure that books were not unlawfully removed from the libraries, showing that human nature does not change very much.
A visit to the exhibition was a many-faceted experience. The exhibits and the accompanying texts were well presented and absorbing viewing, as you would expect. The catalogue is magnificent with beautiful illustrations and erudite and informative essays. As well as being a visual delight the whole thing was wonderfully educational, opening windows on learning and knowledge in many directions; it was a fantastic guide to our global inheritance.
Because the exhibition was so popular, admission to the gallery was limited to about 100 at a time. This was for environmental reasons, to prevent the gallery from losing its cool, so to speak, but it also worked to improve comfort for visitors. As the gallery is not large, it was easy to become a bit distracted by the crowds and the guides with their groups.
Visitors were averaging about 1200 a day in the early days, culminating in nearly 3000 on the final Saturday, an enormous response. The National Library's staff are to be congratulated for making every effort to enable as many people as possible to see the exhibition.
This was certainly a landmark project in that it was a world first. Such an exhibition had never been done before. That so many prestigious libraries were willing to lend their treasures is an accolade to the imagination and innovation of the curator and the National Library of Australia.
Sylvia Marchant
Where would we be without those people who give so much of their time voluntarily to society activities?
Musing on the history of our society, and my experience on the first committee, I counted up the number of members who comprised the first committee: seven. At the latest count our committee comprised 14 people. Apart from the web site activity, the founding committee carried out functions similar to our current activities. How did they do it?
Sandy Paine had a dual role: he held the purse strings and provided refreshments at meetings. As I recall, the rest of us had just one role each.
Founding President Loma Snooks did the work of at least four persons all on her own: as well as being president I recall her doing publicity, meetings organisation, membership database management and newsletter distribution. She was assisted by unsung heroes in Kinhill Engineering, her employer who gave considerable material support to the launching of the society - as did the employing organisations of other committee members.
Few of us had Loma's energy, of course, and it soon became evident that more members were needed to accomplish the ambitious plans of the new society. Peter Judge formed a subcommittee to get the first Freelance Register out and Nigel Harding farmed out the job of planning and implementing the training program to a subcommittee.
Ten years on, much has been accomplished, many activities continue to expand, and we still need willing volunteers to support them.
New members: don't hang back. We are a young society. Ten years ago new members did everything. We still need the contribution of new members to invigorate our programs and inspire us in new directions.
Maureen Wright
(The web page, <www.editorscanberra.org/history.htm>, gives a brief history of the society. )
Thanks to all the members and friends who came to the February meeting to see 'Treasures from the World's Great Libraries'. I feel sure that everyone enjoyed the evening immensely, not just the 'Treasures' but also the engaging talk by curator Margaret Dent beforehand. Margaret's revelations of the background to, and organisation of, the exhibition put us one up on most of the rest of the 100, 000-plus who came to see it. We're a lucky lot.
And speaking of lucky lots, this month it's the turn of all the members listed in the print version of the Canberra Society of Editors' Register of Freelance Editors, the seventh edition of which will be launched at our March meeting. Details of the meeting are given elsewhere in the newsletter, but I feel I must at least mention here how fortunate we are that the esteemed Pam Peters has agreed to come to Canberra to launch the new edition for us. I'm looking forward to it. I well remember Pam speaking to a meeting of the society a few years ago, on the topic 'descriptivism versus prescriptivism', a talk that, not surprisingly, generated both heat and light, but much more of the latter I'm pleased to say.
The seventh edition of our freelance register is the first to which entry was free. The previous committee, of which I was a member, decided that there could be few more worthy ways to commit society funds than through support for our freelance editors. We also thought that, in a wider sense, the benefits accruing from this support would exceed the costs. Thanks partly, I believe, to the nice mix we have of freelance and 'salaried' editors we have a very vibrant, healthy and relatively populous society. I was stimulated to mention numbers by my recent reading of bits of the annual report of the Society of Editors (NSW) Inc. I noted that society had, at the end of 2001, 290 financial members. Our society now has almost 180 members, a rather astonishing figure given that Canberra has a population of less than one twentieth that of NSW and one thirteenth of that of Sydney alone.
The other big event of the moment is, of course, the publication of the sixth edition of the Style Manual, not forgetting too the Design Manual which was also launched earlier this month. After some delays, I at last managed to get a copy of the Style Manual from the government information shop on 6 March after first seeing a copy in possession of executive editor Loma Snooks at our February meeting. I don't want to say much about the Style Manual, because I gather it will be reviewed in these pages in a later issue. What I will say is that (1) it's very stylish, and (2) it's very heavy. I mean the latter literally, that is, in an avoirdupois sense - the book weighs 1. 3 kg, meaning that, if needs be, it can be used for exercising both body and mind. The fifth edition tipped the scales at only 0.9 kg.
Weighty issues of that type can be put to David Whitbread and Julie Hamilton, who designed the Style Manual, at the joint designers-editors-indexers' dinner to celebrate the work, to be held on 29 May at the National Press Club. Mark your diary straight away, though the date is likely to be already tagged as the day on which our May meeting would be held.
I regret to report that I was deemed to have broken the law last Christmas Day, when I was snapped by a pole-mounted speed camera (obviously defective) on Northbourne Avenue. The standard documentation covering the alleged offence duly arrived (some time after the event, fortunately, so I was festively unaware of it). What a mess it is and how much it needs an editor's touch - well, more a massage, really. The instructions about how to deal with the matter are contradictory, I believe, but that matter is too complex to discuss in the space available here. But read the following two paragraphs from a section headed 'Further information about infringement notices':
1. The infringement notice may be withdrawn before or after the penalty is paid.2. If you pay the infringement penalty within 28 days (or any further time allowed) then, unless the infringement notice is withdrawn and the penalty refunded:-
i. your liability for the offence is discharged; and
ii. you will not be prosecuted in court for the offence; and
iii. you will not be taken to have been convicted of the offence.
Is there something fundamentally wrong here? Is it really saying, for example, that if you pay your fine within 28 days there is no conviction recorded? If that is so, why are points still recorded against one's licence? Perhaps our legal editors can shed some light on this.
Ed Highley
Variety is the spice of life, they say. Well, I've certainly had variety in the editing jobs I've undertaken recently. I thought I'd share a few of them with you.
I put myself in the same category as a GP. I don't specialise in any particular genre but enjoy working in almost all. I say 'almost all' because there are a couple of exceptions: I'm rotten at anything to do with numbers, so I won't tackle columns of figures that have to be checked, or statistics, or scientific material containing huge quantities of numbers - I stick to words. And I don't like getting bogged down in massive tomes, so don't ask me to edit texts like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Gone with the Wind or The Macquarie Dictionary, however fascinating they all may be - short and sweet provides the variety I like.
Just looking through my records for the last twelve months reveals a wide variety of editing jobs. First, there was the material for the 2001 Census - certainly a massive job, but consisting of many small and very interesting documents, ranging from contract documents through guides for collectors (including a fascinating and charmingly illustrated one for indigenous collectors) to the forms you all filled in yourselves in August. (Ironically, I missed out because I was overseas.) That job included a great deal of tuition in points of grammar and plain English.
Then there was a set of leaflets setting out guidelines for procuring materials for building purposes. The challenge here was to make the words clear to people from a non English-speaking background. Another small 'leaflet' job was a newsletter put out by a musical group in Canberra - here it was helpful to have a musical background and know that foreign performers' names need to be checked for spelling and that Mozart, and not Beethoven, wrote a particular symphony.
A difficult job was one concerning taxation. When has taxation ever been easy, you ask? This was about persuading industry that it was a good thing to comply with taxation requirements, and showing them how to do it, relatively painlessly. That job required all the diplomatic skills I could muster. Another job that taxed my personal resources was a massive one that required my project management skills to manage a team of editors in Canberra and Melbourne.
My favourite job this year was a second edition of a Services annual I had worked on the previous year. That consisted of many short articles written by Service personnel - all interesting. I could do this job anywhere (and did, even while flying between Bangkok and London). Apart from the editing, it needed a sense of overall design, so that the words would look good in the finished book.
The most recent editing job has been a really interesting collaboration with an author in another State on behalf of a government department. A bit like the eternal triangle, and sometimes just as touchy. However, it all worked out, and a couple of nice little booklets on a topic of concern to teachers and parents will be the eventual outcome.
So, there's been variety aplenty: straight editing, tuition, project management, design, diplomacy, large and small jobs, solo and team efforts, government and private sector documents. And that's not counting the several writing and editing jobs I do just because I enjoy them - this column, a series for Stylewise during the year and an ongoing commitment to the RAPlink email newsletter and website.
It's good to be able to look back on a satisfactory twelve months of working in this field. And it's good to know that others have enjoyed reading this column - some of the articles have been republished by other societies of editors around Australia.
This is the last in this series, but I plan to be back later with something a bit different. Oh, by the way … thank you for having me.
Elizabeth Murphy
We are happy to welcome as new full members this month:
Peter Rodgers (Wordly Wisdom), a former head of the Australian Overseas Information Service, who is now engaged in researching, writing and editing;
Vanessa O'Brien (Designer Business Image), who has been working as a professional writer and editor since 1987 in five government portfolios, in Public Affairs, web editing and as a marketing manager;
Deborah Veness, at present Project Manager, Flexible Delivery Development Unit in the Centre for the Enhancement of Learning, Teaching and Scholarship, University of Canberra, following wide previous experience in similar posts and many years of commercial publishing experience in Hong Kong.
We are also pleased to welcome two new associate members:
Graham Clews and Leeta Bacon.
Tanka is the oldest form of Japanese poetry, and a forerunner of
haiku.
Learn about it at a workshop at the ACT Writers Centre meeting room
on 24 March, 2-6 pm.
Cost: $50, nonmembers; $30, members and concessions.
More information and bookings: 6262 9191 or email
<admin@actwriters.org.au>.
In a New York restaurant:
'Customers who consider our waitresses uncivil ought to see the manager. '
At a Santa Fe gas station:
'We will not sell gasoline to anyone in a glass container. '
In a Florida maternity ward:
'No children allowed. '
In the offices of a loan company:
'Ask about our plans for owning your home. '
In a clothing store:
'Wonderful bargains for men with 16 and 17 necks. '
In a Tacoma, Washington, men's clothing store:
'15 men's wool suits, $10. 00. They won't last an hour!'
Outside a country shop:
'We buy junk and sell antiques. '
In the window of an Oregon store:
'Why go elsewhere and be cheated when you can come here?"
Thanks to Ara Nalbandian, via Peter Judge, for sending these.
Project Management course: last chance
A project management course, to be run by Karen Deighton-Smith on Saturday 23 March, will give members and others a great opportunity to improve or update their project management skills at an exceptionally good price. Karen has worked for a number of publishers, overseeing the production of hundreds of books. She is currently managing projects for the National Archives of Australia.
(This course has had to be postponed - see the latest information on the society's web Notice Board.)
23 March: Effective Project Management course
24 March: Tanka workshop, ACT Writers Centre
27 March: Launch of the society's printed freelance register
24 April: The society's April meeting
29 May: Dinner to celebrate the new style manual
The Canberra Editor is published by the Canberra Society of Editors, PO Box 3222, Manuka ACT 2603. © Canberra Society of Editors 2001. ISSN 1039-3358
The deadline for the next regular issue is
31 March.
Mail contributions on a 3.5 inch disk, using Word for Windows
(essential) or email (preferable) to:
Ann Milligan
Science Text Processors Canberra
PO Box 3161, Belconnen MDC, ACT 2617
phone/fax: (02) 6259 3080
email: scientex@actonline.com.au
If mailing, always provide a printout as well.
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