Indexes Praised and Censured are extracted from Indexes Reviewed, a regular feature in The Indexer.

These extracts from reviews do not pretend to represent a complete survey of all reviews in journals and newspapers. We offer only a selection from quotations that members have sent in. Our reproduction of comments is not a stamp of approval from the Society of Indexers upon the reviewer’s assessment of an index.

Ashgate: English socialist periodicals, 1880–1900: a reference source, by Deborah Mutch (2005, xxxvii + 439 pp, £55). Rev. by Robert Laurie, The Library, 8(1), March 2007..

The only index is that of authors, but the fact that the material is already arranged in such an order means that the index fails to provide any real added value.

Berkshire: Berkshire Encyclopedia of Extreme Sports by Douglas Booth and Holly Thorpe (2006, 450 pp, £109). Rev. by Sue Polanka, The Booklist, 104(2), 15 September 2007.
Nearly 70 sports experts and athletes wrote content for this encyclopedia, which has a detailed (but not always thorough) index…

Booksurge: IT wars: managing the business-technology weave in the new millennium, by David Scott (2006, 402 pp, $26.99). Rev. by Peter Chapman, Library & Information Update, 6(9) 2007.

Missing are references, a bibliography and an index but, as it is promoting the author’s way of working within an organisation, the lack of these features does not diminish it. [A non-sequitur, surely? And these are scandalous omissions for a 402-page book.]

Continuum: C. Day-Lewis: a life, by Peter Stanford (2007, 384 pp, £25). Rev. by Neil Powell, Times Literary Supplement, 17 August 2007.

Peter Stanford’s useful book assembles a vast amount of background detail, but is in other respects calamitous… the index is haphazard and repetitious…. even Cheltenham College becomes ‘Cheltenham School’ in the index. The author’s shortcomings are an occasion for sorrow; the publisher’s for anger.

Faber: Letters of Ted Hughes, ed. by Christopher Reid (2007, ??? pp, £30). Rev. by Sam Leith, The Spectator, 17 November 2007.

They’re let down by a sketchy index, but the in-text apparatus is excellent.

Facet Publishing: Organizing information: from the shelf to the web, by G. G. Chowdhury and Sudatta Chowdhury (2007, 230 pp, £34.95). Rev. by J. H. Bowman, Library & Information Update, 6(10), October 2005.

Often terms are left unexplained or hanging in the air: e.g. citation order is suddenly mentioned (with no definition or explanation) on page 75, but it is impossible to discover whether it has appeared before because it does not feature in the index at all.

Greenwood: Icons of horror and the supernatural: an encyclopedia of our worst nightmares, ed. by S. T. Joshi (2007, 796 pp, $175). Rev. by Kathleen Stipek, The Booklist, 104 (1), 1 September 2007.
A general bibliography and index are contained in volume 2.
The work is weakened by editorial errors. In the chapter ‘The Doppelganger’, people ‘wreck havoc’. A Gene Wolfe story is described as ‘creepy but ghost’. Jerry Ahern and Sharon Ahern's novel Werewolves is spelled Werewolvess. Many similar errors should have been corrected. The index is incomplete, missing many items that are mentioned in the text. With a better index and fewer errors, this would have been easy to recommend, but as it is, it is recommended with strong reservations for larger public libraries as a readers'- and viewers'-advisory tool and for academic libraries with popular culture and literature classes.

Haus: London stage in the 20th century, by Robert Tanitch (2007, 330 pp, £30). Rev. by Lloyd Evans, The Spectator, 20 October 2007.

This is a fascinating, imperfect survey listing all the major London openings along with colourful quotes and reviews. The book isn’t well organized (the index is full of omissions), so it’s not ideal for finding what you’re looking for. But it’s absolutely wonderful for finding what you’re not looking for.

Johns Hopkins University Press: Horns, tusks, and flippers: the evolution of hoofed mammals, ed. by Donald R. Prothero and Robert M. Schoch (2002, 394 pp). Rev. by Samantha Price, Aquatic Mammals 33(2), 2007.
It is, however, unfortunate that the structure of the book makes it difficult to use as a reference work as the index is full of pre-classification popular names. For example, you have to know that the okapi was once referred to as the ‘forest donkey’ or that brontothere translates to ‘thunder beast’.

Hutchinson: The Blair years: extracts from the Alastair Campbell diaries, by Alastair Campbell (2007, 794 pp, £25). Rev. by Michael White, Times Literary Supplement, 17 August 2007.

Campbell famously did not do policy (or God), and the book’s index does not list a single entry under ‘environment’ – a significant oversight that could torpedo New Labour’s legacy. It is still more surprising – dodgy, even – that ‘Iraq’ warrants no indexed listing, though it hangs over the back half of the book…. The Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh has one less index entry than I do, which is misleading.

Allen Lane: The pursuit of glory: Europe 1648-1815, by Tim Blanning (2007, 707 pp, £30). Rev. by Keith Thomas, The Guardian, 9 June 2007.

He has written a densely absorbing book, though one that would be improved by a better index.

McGraw-Hill: Principles of cerebro-vascular disease, by Harold P. Adams, Jr. (2007, 564 pp, $185). Rev. by John W. Norris, New England Journal of Medicine, 16 August 2007.

I found the index to be the weakest part of the book. It lacks cross-referencing, and some sections have only a few entries per heading – a major problem in a book that will be used mostly as a reference.

Manchester University Press: The invention of Spain: cultural relations between Britain and Spain 1770-1870, by David J. Howarth (2006, 256 pp, £55). Rev. by Martin Beagles, Times Literary Supplement, 12 October 2007.

Howarth has not been well served by his publisher. Sloppy or absent punctuation is a constant distraction, and the index is eccentric in places. Such carelessness aside, however, this is a fascinating and well-researched study.

Neal-Schuman: Sing a song of storytime, by Susan Dailey (2007, 199 pp, $65). Rev. by Sharon Cohen, The Booklist, 104(2), 15 September 2007.
Although the index is unreliable, the book is a valuable contribution because it can be used to encourage children to sing rather than just listening to CDs and watching music videos.

Routledge: New makers of modern culture, ed. by Justin Wintle (2 vols, 1856 pp, £225 the set). Rev. by Richard Davenport-Hines, Times Literary Supplement, 14 September 2007.

The credibility of modern publishers stands and falls by how much they are willing to spend on a good index. It is indispensable for reference sources in book form to be equipped with indexes compiled with human intelligence and discrimination rather than cheapskate, automated affairs. A printed index needs to be more nuanced and appraising than the instant word-spotting of Search and Find available in online research. But New Makers’s index has some errors and many vagaries. Its entry on the human immunodeficiency virus correctly refers to page 550 (the joint entry on Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier, the American and French discoverers of the virus, which gently demonstrates the ruthless chauvinism of US reactions to superior French science) and incorrectly to pages 990-92 (which covers the separate entries of Thomas Mann and Karl Mannheim). The index of New Makers is satisfactory so far as people’s names go, but feeble on categories and concepts – a vulnerable point in a dictionary of ideas – and fails to identify similar concepts or activities when they are not mentioned in the text by the same keywords. The three index references to homosexuality take readers to Auden, Foucault and Hockney; but with no hint of the entries on Housman, Whitman, Wilde et hoc genus omne. Indeed, several of the entries have a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ approach to their subjects: Alan Turing ‘died of poisoning, possibly accidental’, we are told, but it seems ignoble to avoid mentioning the medical and legal persecution that led to his suicide. [But it is the indexer’s job to index what is in the text, not what should be there.]

Walker and Company: The sphinx on the table: Sigmund Freud's art collection and the development of psychoanalysis, by Janine Burke (2006, 384 pp, $27.95). Rev. by Robert Michels, American Journal of Psychiatry, 164(10), October 2007
Its intended audience is unclear. It has some of the trappings of scholarship (341 pages of text with 876 end notes), but not others (the index is poor).

Wolters Kluwer/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins: The handbook of critical care drug therapy, 3rd edn, ed. by Gregory M Susla et al. (2006, 368 pp, $39.95). Rev. by Veena Karir, Respiratory Care, 52(11), November 2007.

The index lists drugs in both generic and trade name, as well as disease processes. The index would have been more beneficial had the authors identified the more important pages referenced for a particular therapy, such as in the example of nitroprusside discussed above. [But did the authors do the index?]