Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Indexed

Indexing has an incredible allure for me. I have been marking up references on post-its and sticking them in the margins of the proofs; this morning I consolidated the individual entries into alphabetical stacks, then began typing in one letter at a time (Word will alphabetize once I type in entries, but I need to do it letter by letter so that I can keep track of which individual entries to consolidate - if you typed them all in higgledy-piggledy, you would end up with a good deal of subsequent reformatting still needed).

Probably nobody but myself and perhaps a copy editor or two will ever look closely through the index, but I like the way it presents an alternate route through the book, with each letter of the alphabet - in this case of this sort-of-memoir - representing a kind of self-portrait in miniature.

(This index isn't nearly as complicated as the last one I did! Fewer options here, too, for activist indexing, though in compensation there are more opportunities for mildly humorous entries.)

2 comments:

  1. Indexing must be in the air, at least in the air of writers whose blogs I read.

    "What people talk about when they talk about Robert Frost: A Few Notes on Indexing," by Mark Richardson:

    http://eraofcasualfridays.net/2014/01/15/what-people-talk-about-when-they-talk-about-robert-frost-a-few-notes-on-indexing/

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