What next?

When I was a wee intern, I dreamed a dream. To set this dream against a dreamy background: I have always loved been possessed by worshipped books, so I skipped from school to an English literature and media degree into Publishing postgrad. I studied with the earnestness of my namesake marching into battle. (Which was how I thought one captured dreams.) Halfway through postgrad, I raised my head, threw my hand in the air and begged to be an intern. They said yes, and later would make me do jumping jacks. Lookee! We've wrapped this up in the first paragraph. Not.

Interning was a dream and now the intern had another dream. (Even if this were It, we're now in the second paragraph. Crisis avoided.)

Editor. Intern Me knew I was an Editor. Now, every person who studies a BA with any seriousness graduates in existential crisis (I have the relevant data). Who are we? Where are we? What are we? Why are we? Are we? So 'knowledge' is a misleading statement. Let's quantify it. I had done well in my editing course and often felt as though the skills were being extracted from me rather than embedded. I could spend hours gleefully editing or proofreading. I edited menus. Signs. Emails. (Still do.) I intended to be an Editor. I was Good at it.

Aside. An Editor is not someone who checks for spelling errors and punctuation. Only. We edit for sense: Is there enough groundwork leading to this concept? Do the paragraphs flow in sequence? Are there factual inaccuracies or discrepancies? Does the artwork link with the text? Is every editorial and design convention consistently applied? Does anything smell of Wikipedia? And on. The Editor's job is to take an author's work and bang it into the best it can be without changing the essence of the work. And sometimes, if the work is really bad, we just change it.

Phone calls to magazine editors, emails to reviewers, persuasive marketing copy, book launches. This publishing intern was suddenly a marketing publicity intern. Recap: Editors are by stereotype reclusive, detail-orientated, routine-bound. Publicists? I see a disco ball and it is definitely not actually in my kitchen. My first job in the industry. Trying to convince different media to review a book I hadn't read and didn't intend to. A disco ball. Then they hired a real publishing intern. (I.e. Not me.) She proofread. I called the same people I had called yesterday about a different book.

I needed a sign.

To cheer myself up (for example, after doing jumping jacks) I would: Choose a book, caress the covers (especially if there is embossing or foiling - look it up and be amazed at the things publishers could do but can't afford), open the pages to look at the typeface and smell the paper. (Yes. Smell. Like you don't have a quirk?!) I'm not decoding and cataloguing the scent like a wine drinker here, simply experiencing, but my favourites are those that remind me of reading as a young 'un. This did the trick for a while.

But it wasn't a sign.

One week, there was a company sales conference. The publisher's in-house editor (we usually outsource this work) and marketing manager were flying up from Cape Town. The editor had a 'history', the industry was all a-scandalled (as it often is); no one apart from the directors had ever seen him - only ever heard his name or received one-line emails from him; and the office thrummed in anticipation. We were ordered to make a full report to a colleague who couldn't be there. We were prepared.

We almost missed his single appearance entirely. I was publicising and my colleague next to me was selling, when my manager came out of a meeting and into her office. Straggling behind her was a man, clearly a visitor by the way he was looking up and around him. He wore a tweed vest over a long-sleeved white shirt and brown slacks, probably brown shoes. He stood, put his hands in his pocket and walked to the bookcase behind and to the side of me. My manager called his name, and he turned and spoke to her.

Ever so surreptitiously (as if there is such thing), I scanned him for intel. He looked like a bird, a wren maybe. Not that he was small - it was the way he carried himself - daintily, I suppose. He was balding, with fine brown hair that he probably just combed once a day, without any concern about his balding. His face was average: eyes, eyebrows, mouth, nose. No prominent feature. Except, he looked at things.

Here was an Editor, of the Tweed variety.

I turned back to my spreadsheet but watched him from the corner of my eye as he picked up a large hardcover book from the shelf. He caressed the cover, front and back, as he eyed the title and the blurb. He unfolded it and flipped through a few pages. He didn't bother with the rest of the ritual. He leant down and smelt the pages, the book almost closed, in a V, to capture the smell. Yes! I haven't thought to tell you the importance of these details, to preserve the essence of the scent and your own nostalgia.

That was The Day I knew I was an Editor.

Everything is in flux: editing conventions change over time as someone decides that the use of 'whom' is matter of choice rather than a grammar rule; writing styles change as we react to stark melodrama of the Post-modern landscape; pop philosophy changes as someone wanders even further down the garden path. Dreams do, too. As an intern, and a young sub-editor and then project manager, I revelled in the detail as if I could control some part of the world with my red pen on a black and white page. Now a publisher, I long to manhandle concepts and leave the detail to someone else. This one though, I'm figuring out on my own.