INDEXING

Sam Leith

‘Bag, tote.’ This is what I carried over my shoulder when, early this autumn, I found myself stumping around the labyrinthine brutalist campus of York University. I had inherited from John Sutherland the very great privilege of serving as Honorary President of the Society of Indexers, whose joint annual conference with the Society for Editors and Proofreaders was taking place there.

Meeting indexers in the flesh was a good reminder that the index of your book is not delivered by a stork. Professional indexers — often retired librarians, as it happens — are many, and their work is scholarly, ingenious, fastidious, little paid and less recognised.

The Society of Indexers goes back to 1957; the index itself — though the origins are murky — as far as the 15th century, though a scholarly article in the Indexer has claimed the I-ching, up to a millennium before Christ, is a proto-index. Yet indexes are seldom remarked or admired: you far more often notice them when they are absent or inadequate, and the indexer is seldom if ever credited by name.

Yet they are vital: a sort of X-ray of the text, a map for ready reference, something slightly different to either contents page or concordance and more valuable than both. How would scholars do their work were it not for indexers? How would politicians avoid having to buy the memoirs of their colleagues — riffling an index in search of your own name is the analogue precursor of self-googling — were it not for indexers?

They also, often, offer a sly commentary on the work. As none other than Harold Macmillan (‘Mac, Super’) wrote: ‘A good index can be much more than a guide to the contents of a book. It can often give a far clearer glimpse of its spirit than the blurb-writers or critics are able to do.’ The index to Richard Ollard’s 1999 life of AL Rowse, for instance, gave a perfect sense of the cut of this cantankerous old don’s jib: ‘contempt’; ‘censoriousness and resentments’; ‘sense of rejection’; ‘solipsism’; ‘cynicism’; ‘vindictiveness’; ‘blind spots and prejudices’; ‘egotism’; ‘fondness for money’; ‘liking for celebrities’.

Almost everybody who takes an interest in these things will have a favourite entry, or entries — a cherished joke, a straight-faced reference to something silly, or a concatenation of improbable neighbours. I’ve always been fond of ‘elephants, as example of conjugal virtue, 17’ in the index to volume two of Foucault’s History of Sexuality. And it seems to me that perhaps the greatest aspect of Fantagraphics’s mammoth sequential republication of the complete Peanuts is that it comes with an index. You can track the first appearance of Charlie Brown’s zig-zag sweater (23rd December 1950), Snoopy’s thought bubble, or discover ‘Lucy — googly eyes, first strip without...’

One of the things that can go wrong in an index is a circular reference: and that can, of course, be used as a gag. Stan Kelly-bootle’s 1995 The Computer

Contradictionary gives us: ‘Endless loop: see “loop, endless”.’ ‘Loop, endless: see “endless loop”.’ Douglas Hofstadter included under ‘I’ in one of his self-indexed books: ‘index: challenges of, 598; as revelatory of book’s nature, 598; typo in, 631; as work of art, 598.’ Then under ‘T’: ‘typo in index, 633’. (The index ends at p632.)

Contrary to what many people assume, indexing is not a job that can be done by computers. Computers help — when some indexers still working started out, the primary technology was cards and shoeboxes — but they do not do the work for you. Computers can’t parse abstract nouns, figure out what might qualify as examples of ‘Rowse, Alfred Leslie: cynicism of’, or make judgements about what does or does not merit an entry. Indexing is a craft and it is also an art.

Yet in straitened times in the publishing world, the index is under threat: publishers increasingly choose to do without, or demand that authors make their own or pay for the service of a professional, if they want one, out of their usually very modest advances.

I’d beseech all Oldie readers who value indexers, then, to show them some support. I do not propose, necessarily, that you install an indexer in your spare room as Bob Geldof does with Syrian refugees. But follow @indexers on Twitter. Visit the website www.indexers.org.uk. If you’re reviewing a book on Amazon whose index does it credit, for instance, say so. And if you’re irked by a book without an index, why not write to the publisher to complain? That would be a ‘deed, good’ in a ‘world, wicked’.

Indexes are vital: a sort of X-ray of the text, a map for ready reference, something slightly different to either contents page or concordance and more valuable than both