good news, bad news

[cellio]

Background: Often, the publishers of a prayer book also publish a "pulpit edition", a larger copy with larger type but otherwise identical. A few times I have noticably stumbled when leading morning services; it's obvious to everyone that the regular siddur is right at the limits of my vision (as modified by available lighting). A few weeks ago I casually asked if we were going to buy a pulpit edition and I was told one didn't exist yet. We have a "pulpit copy" of the regular edition that's been marked up with highlighter pen, but the first time I tried to use it I found that the highlighting caused problems for me (too dark, so reduced contrast making it harder to read the text). I made a comment to that effect and ever since have used a regular copy. It's not like I don't know all the cues by now anyway.

So, this morning I was surprised to find, when I got onto the bimah, a shiny new pulpit edition in the larger size. Woot! I opened it up to a random page and marvelled at the crisp, clear, Hebrew. This would make it much easier for me. The joy was short-lived, though; I turned to the beginning of the morning service to find that someone had highlighted all the leader's parts in blue. That's even worse than the pink they used previously. And even with the larger print size, it looked dicey and I didn't use it for fear of making mistakes. Some of those blue sections were dark -- even in the English I would have had trouble in places, let alone the Hebrew.

I really really hope that this is something they were going to get anyway, and that they didn't specifically get a book for my use and then mark it up in a way that makes it unusable for me. I would feel bad about causing them that expense, even though the markup isn't my doing and I would have said something if I'd known. Other people will certainly get use out of it; I only lead one morning a week, after all. But... ack.

For the record: if text must be highlighted directly, yellow is best. But better than marking over the text is to put highlighting (of any color) in the margins, with a tick next to the first word if that's ambiguous. The only time I've marked up a leader's copy of a siddur that's what I did, and it worked fine. (And, by the way: orange. When it's not going over text it's better for it to be a nice obvious color.)

Comments

post-its

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

I dislike marking books which I may want to mark differently (or mark less or have completely mark-less) later, and even more so if it's a book that other people will use too.

Small post-its, especially placed as tabs with the sticky part on the outside/top margin and the rest hanging out of the book, would be my ideal solution. You could also write notes or arrows on them to make their targets more clear. I've also seen various people (kids, adult beginners, people who have trouble with Hebrew) use bookmarks which don't affect the book itself at all.

Re: post-its

[cellio]

I was kind of surprised by the marking; do they really not anticipate making any changes in the (probably) 20 years they'll use this book? The one time I marked up a leader's copy it was solely for my use for a series of services that I knew wouldn't change -- and it was also a photocopy, so no big deal if that was wrong. I had made the photocopy so I could mark some musical cues and (sigh) add in a little translit in a couple places, so I went ahead and marked some cues with highlighter too. (For example, they had the custom -- this was kabbalat shabbat -- of chanting the opening and closing parts of each psalm in Hebrew, but reading the middle parts in English. That meant I needed to jump to the end of the Hebrew quickly; I marked those parts so I could, since I wouldn't have been reading along in the Hebrew already.)

Small post-its, especially placed as tabs with the sticky part on the outside/top margin and the rest hanging out of the book, would be my ideal solution.

I agree. This is much better than physically modifying the book!

Better still is to know the service well enough that you don't need cues, of course. :-) Though I admit that when you're coordinating with other people or doing something unusual, that might not be enough. For example, last summer when we were doing the group services at HUC, I needed to use post-its to mark where I in particular was doing things; if I'd just been leading the whole service I wouldn't have needed that. I also used a post-it to remind myself of one text difference from the siddur I'm used to, so I wouldn't go on auto-pilot and then say the wrong thing. Didn't work, but I tried. :-)