I’d never really given much thought to indexes until a friend (who ran a well-respected publishing organization) casually mentioned that she’d “never cared for” the index in their best-selling book.
“Hmmm” I thought. I’d never considered that one could like or not like an index. They just … were. But no! It turns out there is an entire science and art behind them.
I am a frequent user of book indexes. I mean, think about how rewarding it is to flip to the back, find a page number to reference, feel that “bingo!” feeling, and find what you’re looking for. But conversely, we have likely all experienced the disappointment of an index not yielding something we know is in the book, and we have to search and search through the haystack to find the needle.
The more I thought about it, the more concerned I became about the index for We Suffered Much. While there are plenty of easily-indexable topics in the book, there are also complications.
The lead character appears on nearly all pages. How to index him? Some of the locations also appear so frequently that an index could quickly become bloated with references that aren’t all that important. How to do justice to the important stuff and ignore the irrelevant notations?
I set aside my worries, figuring an indexer would know what to do! My team found an excellent one. She served as president of the American Society for Indexing. She’d won a recent award for one of her indexes. Excellent! An expert equal to this tricky manuscript. She was confident it would all fall into place. Over a phone call, she explained several different philosophies we could follow, and I selected one. Then she set off to do her work.
Several weeks later she reached out, saying that this manuscript was, from an indexing perspective, indeed complex. “oh oh,” I worried! But I’d also known it would be a challenge.
We revisited the philosophies, and took the “what would a reader be looking for” approach. It’s a bit of a hybrid angle, not following any one major index type, but instead taking the best from each. So, I hope that this index serves the reader well. We didn’t include each and every mention of Chicago, or Lake Benton, nor, thank goodness, our lead Surveyor Mr. Irish. But we tried to find the mentions that were important about Chicago, or Lake Benton, or, of course, the intrepid surveyor himself.
And now I have a deeper understanding and appreciation of indexes. They aren’t “just there.” Instead, a great deal of thoughtful consideration goes into them.
Thank your local indexer next time you run into one!