Indexing

Jenny D. posted several entries on her blog a couple of weeks about about the indexing of of her upcoming book Reading Style: A Life in Sentences. (I'm quite excited about this one; always intrigued to delve into the writing subject especially from a writer whose work I enjoy.) Here's a bit of what she has to say on the subject:

Indexing has an incredible allure for me. I have been marking up references on post-its and sticking them in the margins of the proofs; this morning I consolidated the individual entries into alphabetical stacks, then began typing in one letter at a time (Word will alphabetize once I type in entries, but I need to do it letter by letter so that I can keep track of which individual entries to consolidate - if you typed them all in higgledy-piggledy, you would end up with a good deal of subsequent reformatting still needed).

Probably nobody but myself and perhaps a copy editor or two will ever look closely through the index, but I like the way it presents an alternate route through the book, with each letter of the alphabet - in this case of this sort-of-memoir - representing a kind of self-portrait in miniature.

Via a link from Jenny, there is more on indexing from David Lull for his upcoming book on Robert Frost. He has many links in his delightful entry, all again on the allure of indexing.

We had to redo the index for The Flying North before Shorefast Editions reissued it and it was both a frustrating and interesting process. The page numbers had obviously all changed with the new design and we added some footnotes that caused further adjustments plus the original index was a bit crazy. For example, it seemed odd for a book on Alaskan aviation to have an entry for "Alaska". (Needless to say there were dozens of page numbers listed for it.) Plus some of the people in the index were exceedingly insignificant and appeared only in passing mention. Anyway, it was redone and I must say one does put their own perspective into a chore like this; it truly becomes how you see the book in a way, and a personal vision does take hold.

I do find it interesting that you can hire someone to do your book index for you. I can understand wanting to save time this way but can't imagine contracting out for such a personal aspect of your work. And I don't see how a computer could do it either. Often a word would appear on a page in passing - or a name that could be both a person and place. And there are some aspects of the book you don't think of as entries unless you are immersed in the work itself and know the context. For me, the index was one of the more intimate aspects of writing and editing; it's sort of the heart of what has been put on paper.

(We were convinced in the end that Jean Potter, who wrote The Flying North, could not have done the book's index. It did not read like her at all and likely was done by the publisher.)

While googling "indexes" I came across this interesting analysis of a Willie Mays biography and its problematic index. Much of what is mentioned here is what we found initially in The Flying North. This of course brings me back to Jenny D.'s blog and this look at "The Letter S" from her index. Of course that raises the real point of this blog entry which is that Jenny's book sounds great and I'm really looking forward to reading it.