16 February 2006
Maps and editing headaches
So putting in the routes of walks about Beijing hutong and Shanghai back streets often involves drawing in the streets themselves, which have either been ignored altogether by the map-makers, or whose representation is completely inaccurate.
It must be understood that no guide book company undertakes the massive cost of producing new maps, something technically well beyond the ability of its contributors. A very few buy maps from cartographic companies, but these, too, are very expensive, and not always accurate either. A company was paid a large sum for the rights to use its Beijing metro map in my Beijing guide for Cadogan—a relatively simple sketch map with few elements that anyone with half an understanding of Adobe Illustrator should have been able to put together pretty quickly. And indeed that seems to be what had happened, but the map bore little resemblence to the Beijing metro system, had included largely irrelevant trolley bus routes as if they were trams or trains, and had no Chinese. So I had to make extensive corrections, and add in all the Chinese characters. Still the map came back completely hopeless, and we had to to and fro a couple more times before the thing was satisfactory. The company got paid, and its copyright notice appeared with the map. I, who made it actually appear correct, got nothing.
And that's another reason why guide book maps are so hopeless. They are few because they are expensive to produce, even when the usual method is to scan in an existing map, then alter it to house style, then tweak it a bit to avoid copyright issues. They are often full of errors because authors don't proof them and correct them. Your average jobbing guide book author, only in it for the money and finding there's precious little of that, simply flings the required maps at the editor and doesn't want to know any more about it. In many cases the editor is the one who ends up putting on the dots. This is unsatisfactory enough for a city like Paris, for example, where the editor can actually read both the map supplied and other existing maps to check on dot locations. For China, it's hopeless.
When I came to update Frommer's Beijing (for 'update', read 'throw out everything in the existing Godawful book except the word 'Beijing' and start again), I discovered that the existing map was missing an important inner city ring road that had been constructed ten years before, as well as Beijing West Station, also open several years, and which carries more than half of Beijing's rail traffic.
Perhaps the author was keen to see and proof the maps, but I doubt it. I demanded that a brand new map be produced (it was needed, rather more importantly, for Frommer's China anyway), and that I get to proof it. I supplied a new Chinese source map and spent hours marking up photocopies with Romanized versions of street names, the dots for sights, etc. There are a lot of street names, and a lot of sights to mark in Beijing. The first proof came back with fully 50% of all the names wrong, such is the attention to detail. After I'd corrected all those errors I didn't see another proof. And indeed, I was never able to extract a guarantee from Frommer's that I'd see other maps. I saw some, riddled with errors, and the others I didn't see took those errors into print. My other favourite Frommer's errors were a map of Guangzhou that failed to show the area of most interest, and a colour map of Beijing that appeared in print full of mathematical symbols in the place names. But then that was the editor who, while constantly pressuring contributors over deadlines, would take week-long breaks beginning from the deadline dates, thus depriving contributors of an extra vital week, and who, despite the pressure, managed to lose the entire supply of marked-up photocopies so that all the maps had to be done all over again.
But then in the opinion of a Shanghai friend of mine, all editors eventually run mad, partly because writers submit to them sentences such as this one:
Serving authentic but stylish Yunnanese food, diners can sample all manner of flowers, insects and mysterious animal parts, as well as more conventional dishes such as bacon and herb rolls.
I spend another half-day picking over submitted text full of structural errors like this, and other more technical errors such as:
Qianhai Lake.
If you can't see what's wrong with the first one, then forget a career in writing (although an editing job with a major guide book series may still be open to you, or indeed with an expat magazine, since the author of that sentence is on the staff of one of them). For those who don't speak Chinese, the second one, which occurred repeatedly, is a tautology. Qian Hai means 'Front Lake'.
But there was a moment this week when despite the utter triviality of my occupation, I did feel glad to be doing it. After marking up the maps I headed for the post office in the second half of the afternoon, and met the crowds coming home from the office, all identikit people in their anonymous business attire, the women wearing comfortable shoes and carrying their high heels in bags, all fresh from a day of boredom, intrigue, gossip, petty rivalries and power struggles. Once upon a time I used to face London's sclerotic traffic every morning, wear a suit every day, and spend much of my time trying to achieve things against general office inertia, and a sharp pricking sensation between the shoulder blades.
I'm not sorry to avoid all that. And after two months at home, the longest period for some considerable time, I'm about ready to go again. But guide book working, planning a section of a major new China reference work, and various feature deadlines will keep me here until at least May. I've been editing other short pieces on the fly, I've a story on Saint-Pierre et Miquelon to do next week and one on Australia the week after, and there's a fair bit of email coming and going on arrangements for a Japan and Hong Kong trip in May and June. As usual, most of life is admin. Not that much different from being in an office.
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