Easter Egg Magic in Print Books: Indexes
Had to share this post from Carol Saller's excellent Subversive Copyeditor blog. In part three of her series on creating a good index for one's book, she cautions against, among other things, accidentally creating "prank" index entries—by giving examples of intentional ones in computer science textbooks:
"Recursion: see recursion or Infinite Loop: see Loop, Infinite Loop, Infinite: see Infinite Loop"
Ha! And Justin Cooper shares a few gems in the post's comments section from Jan C. Wright's index to Real World Adobe InDesign 1.5, among them:
bald-faced lies about walking miles to school, 271 (*are not!*) Cthulhu, 166 elves, use of in trapping, 401 indexers, upsetting, 191 jerks who bump your arm, 272
So basically, there are Easter eggs in an print books! And probably have been, long before Warren Robinett's secret room in Adventure for the Atari 2600.
Today’s officially sanctioned Easter eggs can be fun to stumble upon: searching for "anagram" on Google yields the message Did you mean "nag a ram"? Some are mostly harmless fun, although not all get the official stamp of approval from the higher ups, despite being born of corporate rivalry, My favorites ones, however, are put there by the people who work behind the scenes: giving their opinion of the work or insight into real life events, like the Minecraft-inspired "Notched Pickaxe" in Skyrim.
Professional indexers have the difficult job of carefully reading an entire soon-to-be-published book (or research paper, etc), note any topics a reader might want to look up, and find all the pages where the topic appears, usually in the short time from when page count is finalized until the work goes to press. It's a tough job, and I'd love to see some hidden messages from indexers commenting on the work or the process.