The good thing about collating was that you learned how the place ran: collating was the nexus, it was where everything came together. From copying the changes of proofreaders, I learned what proofreaders did. I got into trouble for abridging the tedious queries of the libel lawyer (they should have made a rubber stamp). I learned New Yorker style on things like numbers by having to write out “three hundred and sixty-five dollars a week.” “But that’s wrong,” I said to Nancy when she was training me. I knew from writing checks that the proper formulation was “three hundred sixty-five dollars,” without the “and.” Nancy’s reply was “Nevertheless, that is the way it’s done.” It sounded kind of haughty, but she made it clear to me that unless I got with the program I was going nowhere. When Nancy asked, “Do you want me to tell you your mistakes?” I said yes, and was chagrined to learn that I had misread a checker’s proof and put a hyphen into a word that was meant to be closed up. In collating, I learned to check my work three times, a page at a time: line by line, as I was doing it; then again, line by line, after I’d finished the page; and finally, mechanically, one more time, by looking not at the text but at the changes, starting at the top of the page and moving clockwise down one margin, across the bottom, and up the other. You had to be willing to admit that you were capable of missing something or you would not catch what you’d missed.
Ed Stringham, the head of the collating department, had been at The New Yorker for decades and had grown a hump on his back in the service of the magazine. He came into the office most days at about 3 p.m. He had an ambitious reading agenda, which he charted in a series of black-and-white composition books. He supplemented his reading with the art and the music of whatever culture he was into at the time. He had started with Greece, moved on to Rome, and approached every country in Europe methodically: France, Germany, Spain, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Faeroe Islands. He became especially involved in the literature of countries behind the Iron Curtain: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania. He was jaded about The New Yorker. When something came out in the magazine that he really wanted to read (a translation of Man in the Holocene, by the Swiss writer Max Frisch, for example), he waited for it to appear in book form, because he couldn’t enjoy anything that was printed in The New Yorker’s twelve-point Caslon type. He divided up any work that came into the office, even if it was just two pages; for longer pieces he used long division. When the work was done, he stayed at the office, reading at his big slanted desk—more like a drafting table—or in his tattered armchair, smoking cigarettes and spilling sugar packets into and around a cup of takeout coffee. His assistant, me (they made a little show of calling me his “associate”), sat at a desk in a small annex. Ed may have been the model for the character called the Ghost in Jay McInerney’s book Bright Lights, Big City: a pale, white-haired man who roams the halls at night. I recognized him in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. He had known Kerouac and Ginsberg at Columbia, and after a drink or two he would start saying things like “Dig it, man.”
The big challenge in collating was what were called Gould proofs. Eleanor Gould was a legendary New Yorker grammarian and query proofreader. She was a certified genius—a member not just of Mensa but of some übergroup within Mensa—and Mr. Shawn had complete faith in her. She read everything in galley—everything except fiction, that is, which she had been taken off of years earlier, as I understood it, because she treated everyone the same, be it Marcel Proust or Annie Proulx, Nabokov or Malcolm Gladwell. Clarity was Eleanor’s lodestar, Fowler’s Modern English her bible, and by the time she was done with a proof the pencil lines on it looked like dreadlocks. Some of the fact pieces were ninety columns long, and Mr. Shawn took every query. My all-time favorite Eleanor Gould query was on Christmas gifts for children: the writer had repeated the old saw that every Raggedy Ann doll has “I love you” written on her little wooden heart, and Eleanor wrote in the margin that it did not, and she knew, because as a child she had performed open-heart surgery on her rag doll and seen with her own eyes that nothing was written on the heart.