I got an email this summer from an editor at Pacific Educational Press informing me that the press was being shut down this fall. Pacific Educational Press, or PEP, run out of the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, was a small press, publishing only a few books each year, but still a client that had been with me since I began freelancing. Thanks to a connection and reference from my former supervisor at Harbour Publishing to a PEP editor, I received my first freelance contract within a month of leaving Harbour.

That first project was tough. It was an updated edition of an anthology on teaching social studies to elementary students.  Chapters had been added, deleted, rearranged, and revised. I was not familiar with the subject matter, and this was my first time facing a revised edition. The editor suggested I take the index of the previous edition and update it.

Now, any indexer who has been around for a while knows that “updating” an index for a text with this many changes is “indexing hell,” as I heard it so delicately described recently. T0 be fair, I don’t think the editor realized what she was asking. I was still naive enough, however, afraid of the topic, and afraid of offending my first ever client, that I agreed to the editor’s proposal.

Sure enough, indexing that book was hell, but I got through it. More importantly, I learned from it. I learned from the previous index I was working from how to approach this sort of text. I gained confidence that I could tackle a project this different. I felt great when the editor contacted me a few months later with another project.

Since that first project three years ago I’ve indexed five more books for PEP.  Two have been high school textbooks, on fashion and nutrition and health. The others have been on dyslexia (which was also neat in that it was typeset to be more accessible to people with dyslexia), a book on teaching Shakespeare to elementary students (I wish my teachers did that when I was a kid), and finally, this spring, a book on Imaginative Ecological Education.

It was a shock to hear this summer that PEP was closing down. I have enjoyed their books. As I’ve built my business it has been encouraging that the editors at PEP have repeatedly asked me to work on their titles. As my first client, I do have a soft spot for them. Reflecting on the news of their closure, I decided that I did want to write some sort of farewell.

Looking again on their website, however, I see that PEP is not quite as gone as I thought. PEP is now an imprint at UBC Press. Will I work again on their titles? I don’t know. I have worked for UBC Press as well, but UBC Press is a much larger press, with a diverse publishing program, and it is impossible to predict what they might ask me to work on.

So perhaps this is still a farewell. Thank you, PEP, for allowing me to work with you these last three years. I wish you all the best in your new home. Hopefully I will cross paths again with your titles.