The index embraces its silly side
A reader writes: "It may be time for a witty column on `Whatever Happened to the Index?' I love Jim [James] Carroll dearly, but his publisher has cashiered the index for his newest book, `Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War,' leaving those who might want to rely upon his words searching through the entire book for the desired point."
Indexes, subject of. They might be called the policemen of literature; they never seem to be around when you need them. (Although Carroll said in an interview he didn't think "Crusade," a collection of columns, needed an index.) My Bible doesn't come with an index, which would come in handy when trying to untangle the two Lazarus stories, or for that matter the various Simons and Marys. "Common Ground," J. Anthony Lukas's biblical account of Boston's racial politics in the 1960s and 1970s, was published without an index, much to the chagrin of many locals mentioned therein.
There are books no one would dream of reading, but a quick trip through the index would be quite rewarding. The classic example is "The Andy Warhol Diaries" for which both Spy and Fame magazines published pullout indexes in 1989. Spy's is better remembered, perhaps for entries such as these: "Beatty, Warren . . . called disgusting by Jacqueline Onassis for mysterious act in hallway," or "Nureyev, Rudolf . . . awful dancing of."
Martin Heidegger banned indexes from his work, presumably so that no one could skip ahead to the good parts. Sherlock Holmes kept his own index of his cases, as we learn in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire": "Venomous lizard or gila. Remarkable case, that! Vittoria, the circus belle. Vanderbilt and the Yeggman. Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder. Hullo! Hullo! Good old index. You can't beat it."
So, are indexes disappearing? Yes, says Martin Tulic, a member of the American Society of Indexers, who has researched the subject. Tulic's website, anindexer.com, documents a gradual decline in indexes in nonfiction bestsellers since 1975.
"Perhaps not coincidentally, this decline coincides with the period of greatest consolidation in [the] American publishing industry," he notes on his website. Publishers cite various reasons for ditching indexes. For quick-turnaround books, indexes can add two weeks or more to the production schedule.
A long index can increase a book's cost, requiring extra paperwork, so to speak, in the publishing food chain. Furthermore, nonfiction books with literary pretensions eschew indexes as mundane. Just looking around my office, I notice that Shawn Levy's "Rat Pack Confidential" has an index. (Thank God!) Adam Gopnik's "Paris to the Moon" does not.
A well-known nonsecret in the publishing world is that authors pay for their indexes. The cost is generally tacked on to the expenses the book has to recover before the author can collect royalties. Some authors save money by indexing their own books, or doing without them. Publishers now cut indexing costs by outsourcing. "A lot of indexing is being sent to India and the Philippines," Tulic says, where indexers earn just a fraction of the $50 an hour their US colleagues can charge. Material for a fourth presidential debate, perhaps?
If serious indexes are on the wane, unserious indexes seem to be on the rise. Al Franken is hailed on the American Society of Indexers website, asindexing.org, for his "totally inaccurate and hysterical" index to "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations." Here are some sample entries: "Dirigible, Limbaugh size of" and "Doughnuts, Limbaugh's consumption of." My friend Geoff Shandler alerted me to the offbeat index for Julian Barnes's 1995 nonfiction collection "Letter From London." A sample entry: "Bush, George: praised by Mrs. Thatcher, 66; persuaded not to look `like a [expletive] pansy,' 95."
The tradition of the anti-index lives on, on the last page of The Atlantic magazine, where Benjamin Healy now compiles a "Who's Who" of people mentioned in the issue. My favorite from this month's outing: "Kerry, John; as-yet-unwritten political obituary of."
Beam, Alex . . . Boston Globe columnist; e-mail address of: beam@globe.com. 
