Indexes Praised and Indexes 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.

British Library: Indexers and indexes in fact and fiction, by Hazel Bell (2001, 160 pp, £16). Rev. by Mary Madden, Update 1(8), Nov. 2002.
Attractively presented, it would make an ideal gift for librarians, indexers and anyone passionate about knowledge and its organization. There is, of course, an excellent index.

Honoré Champion: Discours sur l’occurrence de ses affaires (Nicolas de Harlay, sieur de Sancy), ed. by Gilbert Schrenck (2000, 156 pp, € 27.45). Rev. by Kathleen M. Llewellyn, Sixteenth Century Journal, January 2003.
The index of names of people and places is a welcome addition, permitting the reader not only a rapid means of locating subjects of special interest to him or her, but also providing the student of sixteenth-century history an invaluable analytical tool.

McFarland: The Muslim diaspora: a comprehensive reference to the spread of Islam in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, vol. 2, 1500–1799, by Everett Jenkins, Jr (2000, 415 pp, $75). Rev. by Joseph Aieta, Sixteenth Century Journal, January 2003.
In many ways, the most useful aspect of the book may be the exhaustive index, seventy-three pages, each of which has three columns. Readers of this journal who may happen upon this work would be well advised to consult the index in order to avoid endless scouring of pages that might possibly contain something of interest to them.

Macmillan: The wreck of the Abergavenny, by Alethea Hayter (223 pp, £14.99). Rev. by Grevel Lindop, Times Literary Supplement, 20 Sept. 2002. The list of sources includes a large number of scholarly works and archives, yet no references are given for the countless quotations and items of information, and one of Wordsworth’s most important quotations on his brother, ‘When, to the attractions of the busy world’, is several times quoted and paraphrased without its title ever being mentioned (though it can be found by scanning the index).

Pickering and Chatto: The correspondence of Robert Boyle, 1636–1691, ed. by Michael Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio and Lawrence M. Principe (6 vols, 3,258 pp, £495). Rev. by Noel Malcolm, Times Literary Supplement, 23 Aug. 2002.
The Internet has in fact just caught up with Robert Boyle: Michael Hunter’s most recently completed labour is an on-line edition of Boyle’s “work-diaries” (www.bbk.ac.uk/Boyle/workdiaries/). And the precedent now set by the Athanasius Kircher Correspondence Project (www.sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/hdis/ kircher.html) suggests that one day, all major new editions of correspondence may be electronic only.
For the time being, however, we should be grateful that a publisher such as Pickering and Chatto is willing to produce such a superbly old-fashioned edition – old-fashioned, that is, in its attention to layout, footnotes, indexing and sheer readability. The new technology is still too new to match this: the Kircher edition, though impeccably up-to-the-minute and Californian, is awkward to use, and the electronic edition of the Hartlib Papers, issued on CD-ROM in the mid-1990s, became technologically obsolete so quickly that it has just now had to be issued all over again. These modern keepers of the flame have done their work so well that it strongly deserves, one feels, to be kept in such a durable form, with no risk of disappearing in an electronic puff of smoke.

Scarecrow: An ounce of prevention: integrated disaster planning for archives, libraries and record centres, by Johanna Wellheiser and Jude Scott (2002, 283 pp, $30). Rev. by Martin Hayes, Update 1(7), Oct. 2002.
Particularly useful is the detailed contents page beginning each of [the] sections, and the index which contains about 1,500 terms.

Scarecrow: Shakespeare and minorities: an annotated bibliography, 1970–2000, by Parvin Kujoory (2001, 416 pp, $65). Rev. by Diana Akers Rhoads, Sixteenth Century Journal, January 2003.
His annotations and his subject index also aid those seeking to locate articles on a specific topic or to limit working bibliographies. The subject index is comprehensive enough to cover issues as particular as ‘Africans and Elizabeth I,’ ‘pedagogy,’ or ‘rape,’ and matters of as broad interest as ‘colonialism,’ ‘cross-dressing,’ ‘gender,’ or ‘patriarchy.’ .... Those focusing on a particular play will wish to turn to the subject index as well as to the chapter principally involved if they wish to survey all significant recent articles treating the play in question.

School Library Association: Books to enjoy 16–19, by Eileen Armstrong and Sue Beever (49 pp, £5). Rev. by Pat Thornhill, Update 1(7), Oct. 2002.
Use of broad subject genre (e.g. Human Interest) means that it is worth checking the indexes for authors that you otherwise may have thought were excluded.

Transaction: Demetrius of Phalerum: text, translation and discussion, ed. by William W. Fortenbaugh and Eckart Schutrumpf (464 pp, £44.50). Rev. by Peter Green, Times Literary Supplement, 9 Aug. 2002.
… an achievement of which William W. Fortenbaugh, Eckart Schutrumpf and their international team can be justifiably proud: 176 items scrupulously edited, fully correlated with past collections, exhaustively indexed, a typographical delight, and provided with careful facing translations.

University of North Carolina Press: Dear Papa, Dear Charley: the papers of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, 1748–1782 (3 vols), ed. by Ronald Hoffman, Sally D. Mason and Eleanor S. Darcy (2001, iv + 1651 pp, $100). Rev. by William C. diGiacomantonio, Documentary Editing 24(2), June 2002.
The only seriously disappointing feature of the volumes’ otherwise excellent and thoughtful annotation is the manner of identifying individuals within the documents. Footnotes provide full identification and biographical information about individuals the first time a reference to them appears. But, after that, there is nothing to confirm whether ‘Cousin John’ is John Carroll, S. J., a different John Carroll, or indeed some other John altogether, unless one turns to the index and finds a page number corresponding to the reference’s location….
The index is superb. The editors do not neglect the little features easily overlooked, but of immense aid to the user, such as listing variant spellings or nicknames for individuals and boldfacing citations to their biographies. Nor do the editors neglect the more sophisticated techniques behind good indexing. Larger main entries are broken down into intelligible subentries, intelligibly phrased. And the content – appropriately like the content of the documents themselves – is expansive, articulate, and inventive. Entries include almost every feature of eighteenth-century life and thought that might be of interest to historians, whether lay or professional, such as individual crops, medicine, and even weather.
The index’s treatment of slavery deserves special mention, because it is part of an overall approach that leaves historians of this critical subject with an insurmountable debt of gratitude to the editors. Slaves are indexed by name, and noted as such in parentheses, along with birth dates when possible. The Papers of George Washington follows the same format. The Papers of Henry Laurens, to show an alternate format, indexes all slaves under ‘Slave names’ – less respectful perhaps to the spirit of the individuals, but, ironically, more useful to the reader who can’t be bothered to scan an entire index for distinct names.