Introduction

One of the first things I look for when reviewing a non-fiction book is whether or not it contains an index. If it does, the next thing I check is whether the index is actually useful.

If the answer to either of these is “no”, I mention this failing in my review. This is unfair on the author, unfortunately because really the blame lies with the publisher. As someone who has been on the other side, as it were, I can tell you what happens as a rule. The contract with which the author is presented contains a clause stating that if the author wants an index then he or she has to pay for its production. Given that a nonfiction author is lucky these days to be paid a royalty, as opposed to a flat fee, this is not likely to be a feasible option. As for the royalty rate, count yourself fortunate indeed to secure a contract that pays as much as 10%. Unless you expect to sell thousands of copies, paying for an index out of your author earnings is just not worth it --  and most books sell only a few hundred copies.

Creating an index

You might think that producing an index in a program like Microsoft Word is as easy as producing a table of contents. To do that, all you have to do is give your headings proper paragraph style headings (such as Heading 1, Heading 2 and so on), place the cursor where you want the table of contents to appear, and then click on References->Table of Contents, and voilà!

The index, though, requires a lot more thought. Look at the screenshot below.

I’ve marked the word “index” as an index entry (by clicking on References->Mark Entry). Instead of the software saying, in effect, “Ok”, it presents me with a number of options:

Do I want to cross-reference the word “index” with something else?

Do I want to index all examples of this word (which would probably be far less useful than you might imagine: what’s the use of an index in which each word has dozens or page references?).

Then I need to decide whether to make this word bold, which would indicate to the reader that this is the main instance of this word in the text. And that’s only after the indexer decided that this particular word is worth indexing in the first place, which in turn requires an understanding of the subject matter and an appreciation of the readership: what words or terms are they likely to want to look up in the index?

In other words, indexing is a skilled profession. A table of contents in essence tells the reader what’s in the book, in what order, and where. Nobody has to do any thinking beyond deciding on the text of the headings and what level they are (that is, Heading 1, Heading 3 etc). But when it comes to indexing, the person making the index has to decide what words people are likely to want to look up, and which instances of these words are the most important.

Thus the indexing function of a word processor is mainly a labour-saving device: the hardest part is making all those decisions. Once those have been made, and various words tagged as necessary, the compilation of the index may be achieved by a click of the mouse.

There is, though, one other use to which the indexing function can be put. Dennis Duncan, in his book Index, A History Of, points out that because the words to be indexed are marked with tags, the index can be worked on even before the print edition appears because the tags indicate keywords and their (relative) position in the text. It’s what is known as an “embedded” index. Once the pages have been produced, the software can generate the index complete with page numbers. Moreover, even if there are no page numbers, as with ebooks, the embedded index creates a clickable link within the text, just as the inclusion of a web page address creates a clickable link.

To illustrate what is meant by tags, look at the second screenshot, below. It shows that the word “index” is an index entry, and is cross-referenced with “usefulness of”, and with the page number made bold.

Here’s what it will look like in the final index:

The good thing about using the tagging approach to indexing words is that if the number of pages changes, the indexer doesn't have to start all over again. All you do is regenerate the index and the page numbers will be updated automatically, as shown in the next screenshot.

There’s more than one way to index a book. Duncan’s book contains two indexes, one created by a human being and the other created using commercial indexing software. The latter generates so many potential entries and duplication (and some omissions) that for the resulting index to be truly useful it would still need to be worked on by a human being.

Is one index enough?

Depending on the kind of book, and the budget, it may be possible and useful to have more than one index. Poetry collections tend to have both an author index and an index of first lines (but rarely an index of titles for some reason).

I recently bought a book called The Life of Crime, by Martin Edwards. This is an encyclopaedic, but highly readable, exploration of crime fiction. It covers so much that I can’t think of anything it has omitted, except solve-it-yourself mysteries in a science fiction setting. (I bought a book of such stories once, and all of them seemed to be solved by the introduction of a crucial “fact” on the last page.)

Because of its vastness, the book helpfully provides not only a table of contents but three indexes: an index of titles, an index of names and a subject index.

Beefing up the humble table of contents

But if an author or their publisher does not wish to go to the expense of an index, there’s much that can be done at the front of the book.

For example, The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction has two tables of contents: one that lists the stories in chronological order, and the other which categorises them by theme, such as time travel.

Similarly, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism has two tables of contents. The first lists literary critics in chronological order. The “alternative” table of contents is itself divided into parts:

Part I: Modern and contemporary schools and movements

Part II: Genres

Part III: Historical periods

Part IV: Issues and topics

Conclusion

Whether a nonfiction book has a table of contents or several, or an index or several, it needs to be easy to navigate. Nonfiction works tend to be used for reference, so it needs to be easy to use in that way. That’s why to me, a table of contents with chapter headings like “Once more unto the breach”, which tells you nothing about the chapter’s contents, or the lack of an index, are good reasons to criticise a book.

Reference

Duncan, Dennis, Index, A History of, Allen Lane, 2021 See my review.

See also:

How I review books on writing

Review: Book Parts

This article was first published in Terry Freedman’s Books Bulletin.