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I is for indexer, the 'third eye' of publishing

By Jane Sullivan
October 5, 2003

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The story goes that when an indexer was working on Blanche D'Alpuget's biography of Bob Hawke, the instructions were: "You may index his drinking, but not his womanising."

The puzzled indexer tried to comply, although there were plenty of references to Hawke's amorous affairs in the text. Was this an instruction from Hawke himself, or from his wife, or from their lawyers?

None of the above, as it turned out. The "Don't mention the womanising" instruction was a marketing ploy. The publishers knew that some people would come into the bookshop, look up the sexy or scandalous bits in the index, read the relevant pages and leave without buying the book. If the customers couldn't look up those pages, the store was much more likely to make a sale.

The art of the indexer is one of the least known and least understood aspects of books and writing. We know what we don't like: book reviews are full of grumbles about bad indexes, or no indexes at all. But do we know a good index when we see one? Who are the people who compile them?

It's a select field. The Australian Society of Indexers has 160 members, often former editors or librarians. Only about 50 are active members, and of these perhaps 10 rely on indexing as their sole source of income.

I've just met two of these professional indexers, Jenny Restarick and Max McMaster. "I see myself as a third eye, after the writer and publisher," Restarick says. "We like to think a good index tells a story. You can read it almost as enjoyably as a text."

The purpose of an index is simple enough: to give readers pointers to further information on a particular topic. These pointers should make it as easy as possible for readers to find what they are looking for. But in practice, the indexers tell me, the job is often much more skilled and tricky than it sounds.

Max McMaster, who lectures in Australia and New Zealand on the art of indexing, thinks that standards are improving all the time. Indexes are also becoming more widespread. They are creeping into fiction: you can sometimes find an index in a crime novel, though of course it will not include a page reference to the murderer.

Yet McMaster is still amazed at how poor some indexes are. Once his son brought home a book from school with pictures of animals. They tried to look up "stick insect" under S and I in the index. Everything, they soon discovered, was listed under W: "What is an insect? What is a snake?" and so on.

McMaster wrote a blistering letter to the publisher and never had a reply. Which is a shame, because children of all people need good pointers to find their way around a book. A children's book can be sold as a school text on the strength of its index.

In many cases, authors write their own indexes. If this is too difficult, or if the results are unsatisfactory, the publisher engages a professional indexer and the author pays the fee, usually as a cost charged against royalties. But some authors are reluctant to pay. They think that all you need to do is use the computer to pull out all the names, and there's your index.

Not so, say Restarick and McMaster. Indexers go through the whole document, carefully analysing the meaning of their material, interpreting words and their context, picking out useful terms and sometimes turning very technical jargon into plain, simple English.

They are paid by the hour, and might get through 10 pages an hour on a straightforward project, much less if the book is very complex and technical. Because they are the last link in the editorial chain, they are up against tight production deadlines that are frequently squeezed. They often act as de facto proof readers without any extra pay.

And although database indexing is a fast-growing field, book indexers still prefer to work the old-fashioned way: poised with a pencil over a pile of paper.

There are still things a computer can't do. There's an American article, for example, with the title The Aerodynamics of Small Dimpled White Spheroids. It happens to be the definitive article on golf balls, but for some perverse reason it doesn't once mention those words. So a computer index on golf didn't include it.

The Australian Society of Indexers awards an annual medal for the most outstanding index. McMaster won it for his index to the Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, a huge task which had to negotiate some delicate cultural boundaries. He was not allowed to index the word "humpy", even though it was in the text, because it was considered a derogatory term: he had to use "housing" instead.

The hardest thing for aspiring indexers is to get their first job, so the Society of Indexers has introduced a mentorship scheme. In a pilot project, would-be indexers will work with their mentors to produce indexes for 19th century titles donated by libraries.

The good news is that there's no ageism in this profession: indeed, it's an advantage to have a couple of decades of life experience. An indexer's average age in Australia would be the late 50s. One indexer in Britain began his career at 93 and is still going strong at 97.

Indexers have to be meticulous, but they can also have fun. One author - let's call him Norm - always used to look up his own name in relevant indexes, so the indexer would put in a message for him: "Hi, Norm!". Another person was such a pain in the neck that the indexer took revenge by putting "No mention" next to his name.

Sometimes the indexer's finicky attention to detail uncovers some major booboos. McMaster was once indexing a world atlas and wondered whether some last-minute changes might have affected the references. He decided to take on the exhausting task of checking every single latitude and longitude entry, something that hadn't been done for several editions. "Suddenly," he says, "I discovered that Mauritius was in central China. Nobody had bothered to check."

