Alphabetizing

Q. I am overwhelmed by the task of alphabetizing a list of book titles, as many of the titles have colons, commas, and in some cases, dashes separating the title and subtitle. It is all getting to be a bit much for me. Given the large number of titles I am working with, I would prefer to ignore all punctuation, but what to do in the following situation? Would I ignore the dash, the comma, and the colon and move on to the word following Band in the title? Believe it or not, these are actual examples: The Beatles—Rock Band; The Beatles, Rock Band; The Beatles: Rock Band; The Beatles Rock Band.

Q. Would I alphabetize Kimberly Bowen-Smith Rinehart under B or under R?

Q. I have an author with (let’s say) the last name St. James and am having a hard time figuring out the correct form for her bibliography entry. Is it correct to write St. James, Bertha? Or James, St. Bertha? HELP!!

Q. I’m editing an art book, and an alphabetized list of mentioned paintings for the back of the book has all the titles with the article in front—for instance, “The Black Rose” is alphabetized under T. I want to change these to “Black Rose, The,” but my author feels that titles are sacrosanct and cannot be changed. I can’t find anything in my manual about treating paintings differently from titles of books in alphabetizing. In the end, I’ll go with whatever she decides, but I’d like to get your take on this. Thanks.

Q. Your style manual shows an example of “Truman, Mrs. Harry S. (Bess).” In an index under “Truman,” does Harry S. come before or after Mrs. Harry S. (Bess)? That is, does Bess come before Harry or does Harry come before Mrs.?

Q. Do you recommend last-first or first-last order for obscure or potentially confusing names in index subentries? Last-first seems awkward in terms of the number of commas required, but first-last requires alphabetizing by given names—also awkward.

Q. Is alphabetizing abbreviations based on the letters in the abbreviation or the letters in the spelled-out word? For example, does wthr (weather) come before wiki (Wikipedia)? Which is “correcter,” letter-by-letter alphabetizing or word-by-word?

Q. I’m indexing Portuguese names. For example, António Gonçalves Caldeira. Am I to index by the first last name or the second?

Q. In a bibliography where the title of an unsigned article is a date (“1939: The Beginning of the End”), does the bibliography begin with this entry, or is it alphabetized according to its spelled-out word?

Q. As the editor of my workplace magazine, I have to alphabetize lists of donors and members. I can find no references to the following situation in the Manual: a man and woman donate as a couple (and thus will be included as one entry on the list) but have different last names. This seems to be an etiquette question, but exploring those references has not helped either. Should the names be alphabetized by whichever partner’s name is listed first on the form submitted by the donors or by the man’s last name? Please share your insight.