The Indexer thirty-odd years ago

Volume 16 of The Indexer ran through 1968–9, with a total of 192 pages. Its first issue opened with an editorial by L. M. Harrod on the meaning and various aspects of ‘indexing’, proceeding from ‘the simple act of arranging words or phrases relating to objects, ideas or matter, in a logical sequence, is indexing’, to consider the problems involved, responsibility for unsatisfactory indexes, different types of index and techniques, and authors’ capability to index their books. He looked forward to ‘a stage where an approved standard may be determined by examination’. Oliver Stallybrass proposed ‘An unusual method of making a book index’: the use of a thumb-indexed notebook. His two pages describing the advantages of this system were followed by comments of 15 UK contributors, including Margaret Anderson, G. V. Carey, Geoffrey Dixon, A. R. Hewitt, Geoffrey Jones, G. Norman Knight, A. B. Lyons, R. F. Pemberton, F. C. Tatham, and John L. Thornton; and Delight Ansley, Robert Palmer and R. Wellstood from the United States. Neil Fisk’s contribution included the acerbic: ‘I agree with Mr Stallybrass that “Nobody who is incapable of copying a three-figure number correctly should be making an index at all”, but I would add that nobody who leaves in the British Museum “a wodge of cards” containing the results of his professional work is fit to be out by himself’. Knight, in a five-page article, traced the history of book indexing in Great Britain from its origins in medieval manuscripts to its culmination (in Knight’s eyes) in the award of the Wheatley Medal and first publication of the British Standard for indexing. Peter Spufford recounted the (then) 80 years’ history of the British Record Society from its foundation in 1887, including its merger three years later with the impoverished Index Society (founded by Henry Wheatley in 1878). Margaret Anderson wrote what proved the first of a sequence of castigations in The Indexer of bad indexes, criticizing that to The English village community and the enclosure movements by W. E. Tate (Gollancz 1967) in over two pages. She quoted ‘some rather engaging asides’, all reproduced here sic: