Authors, Don't Give Your Index the Finger
It is said that if one does one’s job well, one becomes invisible. This is certainly true of the noble index, soul of the book and friend to the misbegotten. Yet we do not sing songs of our indexes. They are forgotten heroes—often literally forgotten by authors who are so eager to publish that they skip the tedium of annotating and cross-referencing their own work.
The process of indexing is, itself, fairly simple. First, read your own book. Hopefully, you’ve already done this at least twice. Annotate. Alphabetize. Double-check all of your index entries to make sure that they correspond to the right pages in your final manuscript. And, while you’re at it, keep in mind these important tips.
1. Not Everyone Is You
Cross-referencing is what people do when they are confronted with two terms for the same thing. One delightful example of this comes from an old college textbook of mine, Foundations of Library and Information Science. My edition happens to hail from the Year 2000, when we were all very excited about the “Internet, SEE ALSO World Wide Web,” the “World Wide Web, SEE ALSO National Information Infrastructure,” and the “National Information Infrastructure, SEE ALSO Internet.”
See what they did there?
Back in the day, primitive librarians fought terrible wars over what to call the giant network that allows you to read this article right now. Even now, I barely dare say its name without heavily cross-referencing it. If you want to avert the same terrible destruction as was witnessed by my colleagues, do not shun your responsibility to cross-reference. If you tend to say “spud,” by all means, add that to your index. But don’t maroon the earnest researcher of your work on a term they don’t understand. Include an entry for “potato” as well. Then point them at one another, SEE cross-reference.
2. Indexes Are For Looking Things Up
Long ago, I was given an extremely lame gag gift: a cookbook. Immediately, I realized that the table of contents would not help me, as it was organized into three sections: “Beginner,” “Intermediate,” and “Expert.” I was none of those things. I needed to know how to fry an egg without setting it on fire.
Those section headings are fine if you intend to give yourself a master class in cooking by reading through the book from stem to stern. Personal experience suggests that most people don’t yank a cookbook until their third attempt at breakfast ascends in pyrrhic glory. Luckily, the index to that particular book included several subheadings for eggs and, hilariously, a cross-referenced entry for eggs under the category “Easy dishes.” While the author imagined herself bringing culinary enlightenment to the masses, the indexer, doubtless a humble drudge somewhere in the lower echelons at Penguin, had well understood the true nature of the people who would be reading it.
Indexes to any reference book should be created with the most hapless user possible in mind. Imagine the fourth grader who must complete a project on Suleiman the Great, whose entry is buried next to King Richard’s in a chapter called “People in the Crusades.” Think of the undergrad who has just begun an exciting new project that is due in two hours. The index should be clear, complete, and fast. It should improve vastly upon the table of contents, which is often as useful for research as a brick to the head.
3. Embrace its Entertainment Value
A great index knows that it is inherently hilarious. Take, for example, the index to the U.S. Air Force Search and Rescue Survival Training: AF Regulation 64-4. This massive paperback tome weighs fully five pounds and is about a foot high. In the event of an actual search and rescue, it would be far more useful as a blunt weapon than as a reference. The fact that this thing has an index entry for “Wild boar” calls up visions of a small but quietly frantic group of airmen, all hunched urgently over the shoulders of the one guy with the big book. About twenty feet away, a 900-pound feral pig eyes them aggressively. “Look in the index! What does the index say?”
The 64-4 is undoubtably the most entertaining index I have ever read, though it’s far from the most useful. (For example, there is no cross reference from “Pig” to “Wild boar.”) But the book is of minimal usage in the field anyway, so why does it matter? This is clearly a volume meant to be perused for fun in one’s spare time. It’s got a civilian reproduction with an ISBN and everything. In this case, the index is merely a discovery tool, a way of finding the really interesting bits of the book. (“Nuclear explosions, 566;” “Mako shark, 128;” “Bubonic Plague, 99.”) The savvy reader will turn not to the preachy and thematically structured table of contents, but to the wild and woolly hat-pick of the index at the back.
So when you construct your index, be conscious of the true purpose of your book. Even if you are a stuffy academic with a 700-page brick of a thesis on Christopher Marlowe, your life’s work exists to engage the mind of someone who enjoys what they’re reading—in other words, to entertain. In amongst the “Themes (theological)” and the “Dramatic structures,” make sure to add “Pants, the question of.”
Anna Call is a freelance writer who blogs about science for Foreword Reviews. You can follow her on Twitter @evil_librarian.
Anna Call
