Every time I do a ‘CTRL F’ search, allowing my computer to achieve in milliseconds what it took the schoolboy me hours to do (find a particular word among pages and pages of text), I think of a small business centre in Sheffield, and imagine its occupants to be shaking in fear at the onward march of e-books. For it’s in this business centre that the Society of Indexers is to be found. (I know — you think they’d have a dusty garret somewhere in St James’s.) With Kindles and iPads able to instantly locate every occurrence in a book of whichever word or phrase you’re looking for, surely the days of the index are (please forgive this, it really isn’t deliberate) numbered? A whole tribe of artisans whose working days are characterised by such phrases as ‘Shaw, George Bernard, 57-9, 113’ are about, you’d assume, to be thrown onto the publishing scrapheap. But actually when you think about it for a moment, the future of the index looks pretty robust.
It’s always had its defenders. The Georgian antiquary Francis Douce quoted a friend who said that ‘the man who published a book without an index ought to be damned ten miles beyond Hell, where the Devil could not get for stinging nettles.’ Harold Macmillan wrote that a good index could ‘give a far clearer glimpse of [a book’s] spirit than the blurb-writers or critics are able to do’. The same love of those pages at the end (hence the pros’ term for an index ‘BOB’ — ‘back of book’) was satirised in 1974 by Spike Milligan, whose book Rommel? Gunner Who? carried the cover quote ‘“We deplore the absence of an index” – Times Literary Supplement’.
About the only highbrow reason for omitting an index is the one cited by Walter Shapiro in One-Car Caravan, his book about the 2004 US Presidential campaign. Knowing that all politicos indulge in the so-called ‘Washington read’ (checking the index for their own names), he announced that he’d ‘dispensed with the editorial feature that has caused more heartbreak than the senior prom’. It didn’t work — ABC News got an intern to compile an index and posted it on their website. The online magazine Slate did the same in 2009 when Sarah Palin published her indexless memoirs. One entry was ‘diet – forced by Steve Schmidt to go on, 284 – Steve Schmidt needs to go on, 285’. Meanwhile back in 1992, the Republican adviser James D. Pinkerton made an assistant plough through a thousand-page book to find all the mentions of him. There were two.
In case you think the Washington read is a myth, listen to Mitch Brown, manager of Kramerbooks, a well-known bookshop in the US capital (Monica Lewinsky used to buy books there for Bill Clinton). ‘Some try to act casual,’ he says of the movers and shakers who pop in to check the latest tomes, ‘while some make no hiding of it. You can see by their expression whether or not they are in the book: a smile or a frown. It doesn’t have to be favourable. Just a mention.’ One American author knew that a colleague of his always did the Washington read — so included him in the index to a book, citing the page number of the index mention itself. A practitioner of what we might call the ‘Westminster read’ was Edwina Currie; among the reasons for revealing her affair with John Major she cited the fact that ‘I wasn’t even in the index of his autobiography’.
Why do I say that the index is likely to survive in the CTRL F era? Because when it comes to searching a book’s content, an e-reader is (as computers so often are) a very clever idiot. Yes, it’ll find you every place in which the word ‘Currie’ or ‘Major’ or ‘underpants’ crops up — but it can’t understand concepts. If you’re looking in, say, a biography of Malcolm Muggeridge, and you want to know what he thought about religion, which word will you search for? ‘Religion’? ‘Church’? ‘Worship’? They would each give dozens, if not hundreds, of results, and you’d have to wade through mentions of someone being as quiet as a church mouse, or Muggeridge worshipping a particular aunt. All that, and you’d still miss a sentence whose only ‘religious’ word was ‘Catholic’. Professional indexers call a list of where particular words arise a ‘concordance’. It’s a very different beast from a properly researched and cross-referenced index, something that only the human brain of an indexer can provide, and the human brains of readers will continue to demand, whether they’re reading on a screen or a printed page.
So the Society of Indexers’ members should continue to earn a living. (Are their pensions index-linked?) And they’ll continue to provide their advice that authors shouldn’t compile indexes to their own books. You can see why they’d say this (do chimney sweeps advise you to sweep your own chimney?), but I have to confess to having disobeyed the rule for my own non-fiction books. Largely, it has to be said, because my indexes aren’t meant as serious academic aids, rather as devices to pique the interest of potential purchasers in bookshops. Hence entries such as ‘QWERTY keyboard, longest word obtainable from top row of’ and ‘dogs, maximum number you can take on London Underground without charge’. Still, the enjoyable task of compiling the indexes has given me enormous respect for the art, as well as an insight into its quirks. Only as I listed page numbers, for instance, did I realise that you write ‘26-7’ but ‘16-17’ (somehow it seems to make sense where ‘16-7’ doesn’t). Then there’s the question of which word comes before the comma. In one of my books, I now notice, the index refers to ‘Big Ben’, while in another it’s ‘Ben, Big’. The latter was probably deliberate flippancy. (Incidentally, does your mobile phone show the surname or Christian name first? They seem to differ. A friend of mine, whose wife happened to glance at his phone as he scrolled through the contacts, received the query: ‘Who’s Black Linda?’)
Also, of course, there’s the childish joy of the juxtapositions thrown up by indexes. Where else but in the final, alphabetically-arranged pages of Harry Thompson’s biography of Peter Cook would you find, sitting together as if at a very badly-organised dinner party, Bernard Manning and Jayne Mansfield? Long may the index give us such beautifully surreal images.
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