Is there a new book that you wished you’d been able to index? Or one that you’d like to go back in time to improve? We asked our panel of indexers about the texts they didn’t get to index.
Valeria Padalino, Advanced Professional Member
If I could choose any book to index, I would probably pick Parallel Botany by Leo Lionni. It disguises as a serious botanical treatise, complete with scholarly tone and scientific apparatus, yet its subject is entirely imaginary plants and botanists. The premise is delightfully absurd, but also raises fascinating questions about the nature of knowledge, classification, and truth, all themes that resonate with indexing.
Indexing such a book would be both a challenge and a thought experiment. How does one construct a system of access for something that does not exist? What would a reader hope to find when every species, term, and concept is a product of invention?
I think the challenge would be to approach it as though it were a genuine scientific text, to take the author’s illusion seriously and apply the same analytical rigour one would use for real-world botany. It would be an exercise in balancing irony with method, and in exploring the limits of indexing!
Parallel Botany would remind me that indexing is not merely about recording facts, but about interpreting meaning and mapping thought. And that, perhaps, is what keeps the work endlessly interesting.
Christine Boylan, Advanced Professional Member
Probably the ophthalmology book with the very poor index I found difficult to navigate through as a student. If I could have indexed that I might have made life easier for all the students who came after me.
Linda Haylock, Advanced Professional Member
There is a recently published book called Finding the Battle of Brunanburh written by Stephen Harding and Paul Cavill. It’s about a big Viking battle that may or may not have taken place on the Wirral where I live. I’m on talking terms with Stephen Harding and have been on many of his walks and talks about the Vikings in Wirral. I have known he was writing a book for over a year now and never once plucked up the courage to ask whether I could index it. I wanted to index the book because I’m interested in the subject and because I know the author (but not well enough to ask him!!! – been kicking myself for months now).
This post is part of our Ask the Indexers series. The previous post asked about their approaches to networking
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