Stephen Leacock explained, a century ago, about book indexes. His essay begins: “Readers of books, I mean worthwhile readers, like those who read this volume, will understand how many difficulties centre round the making of an Index. Whether to have an Index at all? Whether to make it a great big one or just a […]
Tag: index
Appreciation: “No index…, no table of contents…, no order”
“There is no index at the back, no table of contents at the front, and the subjects covered are not arranged in alphabetical, or any other, order. A hotchpotch is a hotchpotch, but not being able to locate or then re-find anything slowly drove me insane with fury. ” That’s one of the delightful passages […]
The Index of The Indexer
Dip, if you dare, into the Cumulative Index from 1996 (vol 20) onwards of The Indexer. The Indexer is, by its own admission, “the international journal of indexing”. (Disclaimer/proclaimer: I am an entry in that cumulative index, because of “The“, which led to this.)
The Golfball Index (UPDATED: May/June 2012)
The May 2012 figures for the Golfball Index (the count of nep patents for golfballs) were again somewhat lacklustre. As in April 2012 there were just 7 new US golfball patents. But the index made good headway back into positive territory during June 2012 – when the US patent office issued no less than 10 new […]
Maggots in the index
This image shows the index to June Preszler’s delightful children’s book Flesh-Eating Machines: Maggots in the Food Chain. (NOTE: You can see a few of the books fun images, on Google Books. One is reproduced here, below the index.)
The The Woman awarded indexing medal
Glenda Brown of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, who won the 2007 Ig Nobel Literature Prize for her study of the word “the” — and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order, writes: You may be interested to hear that The Indexing Companion (my book) won […]