Q. We are alphabetizing a list of acronyms letter by letter, and some contain ampersands. While CMOS advises the skipping of punctuation marks and spaces, I’m left wondering what to do about this symbol.
Which comes first, HMD or H&MN?
A. You can pretend the “and” is spelled out. Unless your list has dozens of entries
that begin with HM, it’s not terribly important one way or another, since readers who make it as far
as HMD will surely spy H&MN while they’re in the vicinity. If your list is extensive, however, with
many ampersands, and you think readers would be inconvenienced by not understanding your method, you might include a headnote
on the alphabetizing.
Q. We are alphabetizing a list of Broadway musical titles and are wondering how we should deal with titles in French that begin with articles (La Cage aux Folles and Les Misérables). We are leaning toward alphabetizing under the article as you suggest for place names.
A. In a work intended for a general audience—where readers are likely to think of these titles with their articles (La Cage, Les Miz)—it is acceptable to alphabetize under the article. But in a more specialized work, or in a work intended for readers who are likely to be well-versed in the languages of titles mentioned in the text, it is usually better to ignore the articles that begin titles (in English and in other languages) when alphabetizing (see CMOS 16.48, 16.51, 16.52 for details). If you choose the latter route and your list is a long one, you might consider cross-referencing.
Q. I work in a bookstore. Usually keeping my section in perfect order is a lost cause, but when trying to alphabetize I sometimes have questions about special situations. First of all, would you put O’Shaughnessy before Omartian because it has an apostrophe, or would you pretend the apostrophe isn’t there for purposes of alphabetization? (I have been assuming that an apostrophe would count as a letter just before A in the alphabet.) I would also appreciate it if you could enlighten me as to whether there is an order for punctuation—if apostrophes come before hyphens and whatnot. In alphabetizing names that have abbreviations in them, should I treat author St. George as “Saint George” or “S-T-period-space-George”? It makes a big difference as to whether to put him in the STs or the SAs. Thank you for your attention.
A. The answer to your first question is no: names beginning with O’ are indexed as if the apostrophe were missing. The answer to your second question depends partly on whether you are using letter-by-letter alphabetization or word-by-word. In the letter-by-letter system, “St. Cyril,” “straight,” and “St. Zeus” would appear in that order; in the word-by-word system, “straight” would come last. Beyond that, I’m afraid the two systems are a bit too complicated to type out here. But I’m sure your store has a copy of CMOS, so check out section 16.61, where the two systems are compared side by side.