Oh dear, what can the matter be this time?

John A. Vickers

And still they come ... Just when you feel confident of having touched bottom, an even more horrendous example of botched indexing rears its ugly head, prompting a volley of mixed metaphors!

There is a case, in the name of kindly generosity, for quietly letting the weakest go to the wall and die an unnoticed death there. There is, on the other hand, a more Spartan case for deliberately exposing the weak and the deformed in the interests of the species. 1 would like to find some middle way between these extremes of sentimentality and ruthlessness. But, if pressed, then 1 have no doubt that the inadequate (and, even more, the downright atrocious) index has to be publicly exposed, though with sympathy where it is due and as much understanding as one can muster of what went wrong and why. Only so can the rot be stopped from spreading and reasonable standards maintained — if not advanced. ‘(S)he did her/his best’ is just not good enough to excuse the inexcusable.

After all, the wisdom of consumerism is more and more widely accepted in an age when quality all too often yields to shoddiness under the influence of market forces (our latest and, it seems, most potent idol). Who (except the perpetrators) would defend turning a blind eye to mechanical defects in an electrical appliance, or to shoddy design work or unskilled maintenance in the case of a car or plane? It is perhaps more than time that literate members of the public (which is more than just a circumlocution for ‘readers’) had some legal protection against incompetent or irresponsible authors, publishers and (of course) indexers.

But I am preaching ... and to the converted; and on both counts must waste no more of the editor’s space, but come to the real subject — or object — of my righteous indignation!

Amos: Victorian Methodist traveller by John Matthews has many virtues (as well as some historical defects); among them, an attractive format at a price which in these days is remarkably low for a case-bound volume. It is also interesting (to a bibliophile) as being produced by an organization called the Self Publishing Association, which sounds a commendable enterprise despite a whiff of the world of the ‘vanity press’.

Sad to say, in present company, by far the most blatant weakness in the book is its index. The evidence that it was produced on a computer (probably without an actual indexing program) is paraded at the very beginning, where the As are preceded by a group of misplaced entries in quotation marks (not ‘quotes’, please: 1 was a pre-war baby, brought up on inverted commas!). If this were all, we might settle for sympathy, directed wherever it was most deserved. But it is only the beginning. Correcting it would have left much more fundamental weaknesses in the main body of the index.

Not to be tediously detailed, let me do little more than catalogue those weaknesses which may at least identify the main pitfalls of ‘self-indexing’ for the unwary author who is persuaded that no particular skills or techniques are involved. If this helps to avert the threat of further indexes of similar deplorability, it will have served its purpose and intention.

1. Inappropriate (because uninformative and therefore unhelpful) headings abound (e.g. Middle Street; Primrose Street; Thurnham Street). Obviously, these should have been treated as subheadings of the places in which they are located. Middle Street turns out to be in Lancaster. This blemish is compounded by the fact that the first of the two page-references is to an Independent Methodist church and the second to an out-house in the same street (and probably not worthy of an entry).

A rather different example of how failure to be specific can be unhelpful is the heading ‘Bentham’. Even without initials or first name, this raises false expectations, and then turns out to he a Lancashire place name. (Ironic that so useless an entry should lead us to expect to find the arch-Utilitarian!)

2. The places in which Amos Matthews exercised his ministry are used as the main chapter headings and — presumably for that reason — do not feature in the index. This is an error of judgement, since the same place-names do occasionally turn up in other chapters. There is one exception, Lancaster. For no obvious reason, this is singled out for inclusion, only to be followed by a string of 49 page references, most of which are consecutive and could have been reduced to ‘161–200’.

3. Conflation of different items whose only link is that they share a common label: The entry ‘Bethel, 123,126’ conceals the fact that the first reference is to a ‘Bethel Evangelistic movement’ in Liverpool, while the second is to Bethel Chapel in Wakefield. Here is our old enemy ‘verbal indexing’ once again.

4. Lack of discrimination in deciding what to index. The statement that a local Liberal M.P. was eventually elevated to the Peerage as Lord Burton gives rise to the entry ‘Peerage, 60’. The comment that Amos ‘had already slipped into his role as the Nonconformist Bishop’ is solemnly indexed under that last phrase. On the other hand, many significant details do not get a look-in, so that the index fails lamentably as an aide-memoire.

Since my concern is with underlying principles, I pass over technical faults (such as the failure to invert the phrase ‘Churchwarden Longman’). My point is that competent indexing calls for more than an application of basic skills.

Correspondence with both publisher and author has established that the index was prepared by the latter, but that blame has to be apportioned between them. The index as printed was a first draft, ‘to be drastically edited and improved’, but overtaken by the production schedule, so that it was treated as camera-ready copy without, apparently, the knowledge of either the author or the copy-editor. Clearly, the publishers have much still to learn about monitoring their production schedules, and the author deserves sympathy — but not unreservedly. It is another case of –All have lost, and none shall have prizes.’ For the remaining faults in the index are pretty fundamental, and it is hard to believe that, having got there in the first place, they would have been eradicated by anything short of competent re-indexing. As a much higher Authority than I would tell you, creation involves more than tinkering with chaos.

The Indexer, Vol. 18 No. 3, April 1993, pages 155–6