At the cocktail party

Back-of-the-book indexing is much misunderstood, which I know from having to argue at cocktail parties that it cannot be done adequately, let alone well, by a computer. (Yes, unfortunately, that’s what passes for cocktail-party banter in my neighborhood.)”

 

I’m glad Carol Saller still gets invited to cocktail parties. A senior manuscript editor at the University of Chicago Press and author of many children’s books, she has plenty of smart things to say about indexing.

 

An index, after all, is not a list or an outline or a concordance. In its highest incarnation, it is more like a map or tree showing the looping and scattered relationships of topics and subtopics throughout a book. Indexers harvest concepts as much as words; their index entries regularly feature words that never appear themselves in the text being indexed.