let's do the time warp again

I just finished indexing a 500-something-page book, the publisher, author, etc., of which are not important . . . or maybe they are but I'm showing a little discretion. While it's my intent to be honest here about what I do and the troubles I sometimes run into, it's not my desire to embarrass anyone or make any potential clients wary of using me. That's why I am no longer posting what I work on, in case anyone's noticed -- because I want to be able to talk about this work openly without giving the impression that I think some book or publisher or author is just circling the drain. And I don't want someone to do the detective work and say, "Oh, he's been reading X, and here it is two weeks later and he's bitching about X."

But, damn.

This book for which I completed the index is a business book that seems to have been written in the late '80s, maybe updated slightly in the '90s, and a few bones were thrown at it in the current millennium. And it's being put out for publication now.

Please remember, dear readers, that much of what I work on deals with events of about 2000 years ago. I'm presently (yes, I'm taking a break at one in the morning to post to the blog) proofreading a book about the presumed Q source for the NT Gospels, so we can say that the circumstances haven't changed much lately. While the intellectual climate of course has done its flips and flops and a few new discoveries have hit the bricks -- little wonders like the Dead Sea Scrolls -- well, we're basically dealing with a given set of events.

Business? You don't think there's a reason, especially these days, to put out an up-to-date book about certain aspects of business and the economy? (I'm being very careful not to mention the particular focus.) The book barely touches the Internet, doesn't discuss gas or energy at all, and states that the U.S. might run the occasional trade deficit, and what the effects of that are. Might? Hell, they were discussing the trade deficit when I was working at the Fed in the late '80s.

So, I'm not sure where this book is going. I daresay that 90 percent of its references are from the 1970s and 1980s. Maybe some things don't change, but a whole lot do. And in the present circumstances, where it seems that unless you got 9 figures in federal reserve notes stuck in your mattress you're living on one of the seven levels of hell, reading a business book that acts as if the last 20 years -- much last the last 20 weeks -- never happened is a shocker indeed.