Creating a Book's Index

I fondly imagined my J. S. Haldane bio Suffer & Survive was at the printers. Instead I've just received its index to review.

Reading an index is an intriguing way to review one's own book. The alphabet clearly gives it an order, but otherwise an index smashes through all the carefully impanted narrative sense and chronology (perhaps much as a reader's memory might do). As characters crop up in the index, I work to place them within the story.

Ideally the index is creative in its own way - its writer portraying his / her own reading of the book. It's one of the earliest feedbacks you get on the completed draft. That's happened to some extent. The index-writer (I must find out the professional term for such a being) has done well in sifting through the family relationships that can be blurred by similarity of name. I finished my first read in an admiring mode.

Then one of my new colleagues at Plymouth University set me to thinking. He mentioned the challenge of going into one's own index to discover material you know to be in the book, to see if the index directs you successfully. Suddenly my index started letting me down. Haldane introduced canaries into mines for the first time. Canaries were missing from the index. He invented the salt tablet. No salt tablet. He helped ventilate the Mersey Tunnel. No Mersey tunnel. He pioneered deep oxygen treatment. You've guessed it.

The trick in academia, a Plymouth historian informed me, was to do your own index. He took ten very full-time days to write up his own last one. Well I'm grateful for all the work someone else has put into this one of mine. Especially so since my contract stipulated, in what I thought was a particularly sad clause, that I should pay half the costs of such an index but Simon & Schuster have come through to pay the whole whack. So tomorrow I shall steam in for a mere day to add my revisions and on we go. Maybe even to the printers.