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.

Avena Publications: A Sligo miscellany: a chronicle of people, places and events of other days, by John C McTernan (616 pp). Rev. by Hugh Oram, Books Ireland, April 2003.
…where the book does fall short is its index. A more professionally compiled index would have been a great asset, helping readers to better steer a course through the jungle and jumble of words.

Blackwell Publishing: External fixation in small animal practice, by K H Kraus, J P Toombs and M G Ness (2003, 240 pp, £45.50). Rev. by S R Snelling, Australian Veterinary Journal, 81 (10), October 2003
There are no references in the text and only a limited index.

Ebury Press: Madhur Jaffrey’s Ultimate Curry Bible (2003, 288 pp, £25). Rev. by Eric Griffiths, Evening Standard, 8 December 2003.
A better index would help uninitiates who may be thrown when they find ‘pandanus leaf (bai toey, rampe, daun paandan)’ as a 13th ingredient for the prawns, though none of these names appears in any of the book’s alphabetised lists (after 20 minutes’ searching, I found ‘pandanus’ under ‘Screw Pine’, ‘the vanilla of South-East Asia’. I am a public-service reviewer.)

Frank Cass: British mission to the Jews in nineteenth-century Palestine, by Yaron Perry (2003, 230 pp, £42.50/17.50). Rev. by Hugh Montefiore, Church Times, 8 August 2003.
The pages in the index bear no relation to the pages of the book itself, and may even be derived from the Hebrew text from which it has been translated.

Four Courts: Ireland: a social, cultural and literary history, 1791–1891, by James H. Murphy (224 pp, €24.95/£19.95). Rev. in Books Ireland, Summer 2003.
A vast categorised bibliography takes 48 pages, but the index is not madly helpful – to look up the Vatican Council you have to seek the word ‘First’!

Gibson Square: Whistler and his mother, by Sarah Walden (242 pp, £15.99). Rev. by Judith Flanders, Times Literary Supplement, 12 Sept 2003.
…she has been poorly served by her publisher: the proofreading is bad, the editing non-existent (characters are introduced at their third or fourth mention, dates don’t always tally), and the index is absurd, conflating Dante Gabriel and William Michael Rossetti, omitting page references entirely for several entries, including the one for Whistler’s mother (who appears only under her maiden name) and, perhaps my favourite, listing Nicholas I under ‘C’, for Czar.

Headline: Mince pie for starters, by John Oaksey (278 pp, £18.99). Rev. by Stoker Hartington, The Spectator, 15 November 2003.I have only one complaint about this charming book: the index is a bad joke and not worthy of its name.

McFarland & Company: Christian librarianship: essays on the integration of faith and profession, ed. by Gregory Smith (2002, £31.50). Rev. by Kenneth G B Bakewell, Librarians’ Christian Fellowship Newsletter, 84, Summer/Autumn 2003.
I would wish for a better index to this book. There are far too many omissions (e.g. affirming, Anabaptists, book/stock selection, faceted classification, Enlightenment, information explosion, interacting, plagiarism). Some cited authors are indexed but others are not: for example there were no entries under Foskett or Waller to help me write this review! I presume the index was not compiled by a professional indexer.

Oxford University Press: The Oxford companion to the body, ed. by Colin Blakemore and Sheila Jennett (2001, 779 pp, £39.50). Rev. by Graham Farmelo, The Lancet, 359 (9318), 11 May 2002.
The book is immaculately produced and well illustrated. My only gripe concerns the index, which should have been long and detailed so that readers can easily find and retrieve information from its 779 pages. Alas, the index consists of only ten pages, and I often found it let me down when I sought a lost gem that I had neglected to reference. This would be well worth correcting in the next edition.

Oxford University Press: The Oxford companion to the history of modern science, ed. by J Heilbron (2003, 960 pp, $110). Rev. by Ryan J. Huxtable, Nature, 424 (3), July 2003 Nature, 424 (3), July 2003.
The thematic listing at the front of the volume of main headings and subheadings was more useful than the index. Thus, the index entry of 357 for ‘civil rights’ leaves the reader scanning two densely printed columns in search of the elusive reference.

Palgrave Macmillan: Psychoanalysis, psychiatry and modernist literature, by Kylie Valentine (2003, £45). Rev. by Sarah M Hall, Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain Bulletin, 14, Sept 2003.
Yet, for a text with complex arguments and concepts, the index is quite inadequate, covering a scant two pages.

Parthenon Publishing: Foundations of evidence-based medicine, by Milos Jenicek (2003, 392 pp, £59.99). Rev. in Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 96, October 2003.
The facts are all here and much original thought, but the high noise to signal ratio makes it difficult to find what one is looking for. I still don’t know when I should use odds ratio and when relative risk reduction, when sensitivity and when positive predictive value, and when I looked up the latter terms in the index, to have a second go, I found they weren’t there even though they are dealt with in the text. Bayes’ theorem, one of the cornerstones of EBM, is also missing from the index although present in the text.

K G Saur: Information sources in music, ed. by Lewis Foreman (2003, xx+445 pp, € 110). Rev. by Anthony Pither, Update, 2 (9), Sept 2003.
My advice is to note the page of anything that captures your attention since the index is not comprehensive – a tall order, perhaps, in a book teeming with names.

Scala: Great smaller museums of Europe, by James Stourton (272 pp, £29.95). Rev. by Bevis Hillier, The Spectator, 15 November 2003.
Another gem Stourton plucks out of the air is Kenneth Clark on Lord Hertford, of Wallace Collection fame: ‘He sometimes failed to recognise that between a silk shirt of Watteau and a satin doublet by Meissonier lay the whole secret of art.’ (By the way, this reference is wrongly indexed as ‘Juste-Aurèle Meissonier’, who was an 18th-century rococo silversmith and designer, not the flashy 19th-century painter to whom Clark was referring.)

Tempus: The archaeology of mills and milling, by Martin Watts (2002, 160 pp, £16.99). Rev. by David Crossley, The Antiquaries Journal, vol. 83, 2003.
The publisher has skimped on the index, which is inconsistent. It is essential that every mill site mentioned in the text should have an entry in the main alphabetical listing. Some do not, being found, by chance, in a subset of monastic mills. Other categories of mill (industrial mills, horizontal wheels, etc) do not have named subsets, merely lists of page references.

Tempus: Christ’s poor men: the Carthusians in England, by Glyn Coppack and Mick Aston (2002, 160 pp, £17.99). Rev. by Lawrence Butler, The Antiquaries Journal, vol. 83, 2003.
The infuriating aspect of the book is its idiosyncratic index: some chapters are fully covered, others most erratically.

Scarecrow: Victorian horizons: the reception of the picture books of Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway by Anne Lundin (2001, 296 pp, £57). Rev. by Diana Dixon, Update, 3 (1), January 2004.
Scholars will be disappointed by the limitations of its index.

John Wiley: Nutrition in early life, ed. by Jane B. Morgan and John W T Dickerson (2002, 374 pp, £34.95). Rev. in Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 96, May 2003.
When searching for specific topics one needs to go through the chapter details in the front rather than the index at the back: I wanted to find something on vegan diets and vitamin B12. V in the index gives the page for vegetarianism but not vegans and the vitamins list shows only the fat-soluble ones. However, the text includes tables that contain exactly the information needed.