Blowing my own trumpet

After retirement from my main job I spent quite a few years working part-time as a freelancer indexer just doing a few commissions each year to supplement my income. Usually I never got to see the finished product except by chance in Waterstones. When I started the normal thing was for publishers to send hardcopy pages usually on one side of A4 with crop marks to show how the pages would be cut to a smaller size. Later the book would be sent as a pdf file so I would have an electronic copy of the book on my computer but nothing like as nice as handling the real thing. Indexing could not be started until all the pagination was settled so it was more or less the final stage before typesetting and printing. So publishers always wanted it done yesterday. Although it was not part of my remit to proofread there were usually quite a lot of errors that had slipped through and which I made a note of. But one of the editors I worked with did sometimes send me a copy of the finished article just as a complimentary copy. I gathered half a dozen or so here.