Indexers and Indexes in Fact and Fiction

Greg Villepique

Indexers and Indexes in Fact and Fiction is, by default, a worthy addition to the bookshelf of popular literature about indexing. It catalogues odd excerpts from indexes and mentions of indexers in fiction, with commentary mostly by its editor, Hazel K. Bell, "a freelance indexer, compiler of over 6oo published indexes, and [former] editor of The Indexer, the journal of the Society of Indexers." Bell, her society, and most of her specimens are British, though a quick Internet search-- does a search engine count as a kind of index?-uncovers a powerhouse American Society of Indexers as well. So my nagging mental image of Hazel K. Bell as a unique creature, the egghead spawn of John Cleese and a Cotswolds librarian, is probably unfair. At any rate, this little volume illuminates, like no other I have ever read, the lonely zeal of the professional indexer.

Most of us have been thwarted by bad indexes at some point. Quirky taxonomy, scant subheadings, and other forms of disdain for the reader abound. Bell blames this kind of shoddiness on the time-honored tradition of spousal indexing: "The married state certainly need not preclude women from being competent indexers, but undertaking to love, honour and obey was not necessarily intended to include the indexing of the literary works of the master of the house.... Indexing is not one of the domestic virtues."

In her foreword, A.S. Byatt, several of whose novels Bell has indexed, explains what's good about a good index: "It represents order-it is helpful, it leads you to what you were trying to find, and also to what you needed, but did not know you needed to find. It also has the delightfully mad quality of heterogeneous things linked violently together by the arbitrary order of the alphabet.... A good index is a work of art and science, order and chance, delight and usefulness." Granted, Byatt speaks from a rather remote precipice of connoisseurship, and if you are not already an index aficionado this short book may demand more sustained attention to indexes than you can spare, even though many of the quoted indexes justify Byatt's enthusiasm.

Take, for instance, these quixotic entries from a 1742 index to the Lady's Magazine, or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex: Christnings. See Burials Dream of a bad fallen Minister Europe, to what the present unhappy State of its Affairs is owing

Free People must be treated like a fine Woman Insect, aquatick, a remarkable one

Unless people's brains worked differently then, the only way anyone would find these entries in situ would be to stumble on them by accident. It's only natural to wonder briefly about the substance of the passages to which they point; on the other hand, I am grateful to Bell for preserving the promise of brilliance and not spoiling it by explaining.

One strategy of indexing involves, in Bell's words, "the vivid expression of vigorous opinion." Sometimes that opinion jibes with the views of the book's author, sometimes not. I know less about Thomas de Quincey than I should, so I'm not sure whether these entries, from a fin de si&de index to his Collected Writings, warp his meaning:

Horses, weeping Leibnitz, died partly from the fear of not being murdered Muffins, eating, a cause of suicide Pig-grunting, mimicry of

The finest gem in the book is taken from Desmond Ryan's The Fenian Chief: A Biography of James Stephens (1[967):

O'Brien, An: never turns his back on an enemy, 32 would never retreat from fields in which ancestors were kings, 33 does, 34

Julian Barnes's Letters from London iggo-1995 sports a long entry on Margaret Thatcher, including the following subheadings: "rumours of lunacy; receives electric shocks in bath; `bawls like a fishwife'; accused of war crimes"; and on through "bursts into flame" and "unimpressed by the French Revolution." It is heartening to know that the field of indexing is elastic enough to allow for attack indexes.

Lots of Bell's indiciana comes from these intentionally playful sources, and the better ones make the lesser ones look a little desperate to amuse. The going gets squirmy with such inclusions as this, from the seventh edition of Textbook of Pediatrics (1959), edited by Waldo E. Nelson and indexed by his daughter: "Birds, for the, 1-1413." As for indexers portrayed in fiction, Bell notes, "Many types are to be found there, not encouraging to the professional indexer." Cautious, socially hindered drudges, mostly, to judge by the range of samples, the majority of which are from minor novelists and are unlikely to beguile you if you do not happen to be an indexer yourself.

But if Indexers and Indexes has its limits as entertainment, you just can't stay mad at Hazel K. Bell. She even writes poetry about indexing: "Crossreferences all integrated / In a model of intricateness; / Alphabeticization is flawless- / So how come my house is a mess?" Read through the whole thing, with all its angles on an unenviable but crucial task, and the next time you consult a good index you are bound to applaud its compiler's care and to wish him or her Godspeed.

[Author Affiliation]

Greg Villepique is a writer and editor living in New York.