Free Ghosting by Jennie Erdal

were editorial directors, marketing directors, publicity directors and public relations directors. According to my business card I was a commissioning editor. But whom was I going to commission, and what was I going to edit?
    Nothing much was explained, though a lot could be picked up from looking and listening, and from reading trade publications. Much of the time, however, I had a vertiginous sense of bafflement about what I was meant to be doing. And people were suspicious of the New Girl, partly because of the atmosphere of mistrust in the sultan's seraglio, where New Girls might easily elbow out those who were not quite in mint condition. I wanted to tell them that they had nothing to worry about: that I was no threat, that I just wanted a job to stop my brain softening, that I had no need of orchids or perfume, that I didn't want to disturb their domain. Yet I said none of this.
    Instead I studied Judith Butcher's
Copy-Editing
and stumbled upon a fascinating new world full of rules and regulations, all setout with biblical authority: where to put the spaces when showing degrees of temperature, how to convert footnotes to endnotes, what to do with trade names, and which typeface to use for classical Greek. It amazed me that someone had made decisions about all of these things and had set a clear standard. Copy-editing, so I discovered, is a complicated business—an intricate system of textual symbols and marginal marks contained within a rigid structure of spelling, grammar and punctuation. It seems to be part science, part art, and it even has a strange and wonderful language of its own: widows and wrap-rounds, bleeds and blocks and blurbs, serifs and slugs and stets. It is oddly alluring.
    After a few months I had managed to learn quite a lot from the Butcher bible, and in due course typescripts began to arrive on my desk with a note asking me to “cast an eye” over them, as if they might be part of a window display. But the work was detailed and precise and it could not be rushed. Copy-editing felt like leaving the world for a while, and the exactness of it was strangely restful. It was also obsessive. I would scour each page for split infinitives and hanging participles; or pounce on a widow and gleefully rearrange the spacing to remove all trace of it. Before long I began to see inordinate beauty in marginal squiggles or the hieroglyphs of textual marks, and though neatness and orderliness had never been my strengths, I soon found that I was keeping my pencil, ruler and eraser in a little wooden box on my desk and guarding them fiercely from casual thievery. I straightened and patted the pages of each typescript into even blocks, and if ever anyone asked to borrow my pencil-sharpener I had to stop myself from screaming. During the working day I was neurotically perfectionist about everything, and at night I dreamed of tiny wooden compartmentscontaining my children's milk teeth, toenail clippings and chicken-pox scabs.
    Further estrangement from normal life was averted by a visit to the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 1981.I had been in touch with agents representing writers from the Soviet Union (as it then was), and we had arranged to meet at Frankfurt and talk about English language rights. I began to see the possibility of setting up an interesting list of Russian books in translation. I was determined to seize this opportunity—if only to justify my existence at work.
    The journey to Frankfurt gave me my first taste of travelling with Tiger. We met outside his house in Mayfair where the chauffeur was waiting, this time in a shiny black Bentley, to drive us to Heathrow. Tiger was wearing a long overcoat of wild mink, which he removed before getting into the car. “Do you like it?” he asked, stroking himself with both hands. “It's by Fabienne of Mayfair— my wife gave it to me as a Christmas present.” Underneath he wore a Hermès jacket in red and blue suede, and shoes made from red lizard skin. “For