On Indexing Books
I received this email: "Why are you indexing books?" Here's why.
I begin, as always, with Pareto's distribution: 20/80. As an author and also as a publisher, I assume that only about 20% of people who buy a book of nonfiction will read it cover to cover. Any author who assumes otherwise is probably kidding himself.
Every once in a while, we watch a video interview of somebody who is a writer. Often, we will see shelves full of books behind him. I guarantee you that he has not read all of those books. Maybe he has read 20% of them, but that's a big maybe. Yet he is a professional writer, and professional writers do a lot of reading. In other words, the person being interviewed is abnormal in the number of books that he owns, and he is probably abnormal in the percentage of books that he has actually read. My father-in-law, R. J. Rushdoony, was an exception, but he was an exception in a lot of ways. He read a book a day for about 50 years, five days a week. It adds up. He also underlined them and made notations of key ideas and page numbers in the back. Yet at 300 books a year, for 50 years, that is "only" 15,000 books. He owned 30,000 books.
MEMORY LOSS
People remember maybe 4% of what they read in a book one week after they read it. Again, it's Pareto: 20% of 20%. But, five years later, people remember under 1%. Pareto: 20% of 20% of 20% = 0.8%.
If a person vaguely remembers that he read something in a book a week ago, or more likely, five years ago, he won't know where in the book he read it. He will have forgotten the details. If he cares enough about refreshing his memory, he needs an index. The index had better be comprehensive. It had also better be laid out in a coherent way.
People who have never indexed a book do not understand just how complex a task it is to create such an index. The procedure is not all that complex, but thinking on behalf of the future unknown reader is tricky. What key words will he look for? Especially difficult is this: what ideas will he be looking for, and what words will he use to search for these ideas?
Sometimes, a key word will do the job, but it has to be a memorable word. If the author has used it more than five or six times, he will have to break down the categories separately. For example, I may refer to God in a book 100 times. It does no good for the reader to see 100 pages listed under the word "God." So, I have to break the references down into subcategories, which I arrange alphabetically. This way, the reader may be able to find the reference he is looking for.
There is something else to consider. Serious scholars go looking for a particular idea, word, or event. They see a reference to a particular book. They are not going to read the entire book in order to track down what the author has to say about something specific. So, if the author wants a serious scholar to pay attention to whatever his opinion is on a particular idea, word, or event, he must provide an index. The serious scholar will go to the index first, and he will search for whatever it is he is looking for. If the index does not make a clear reference to this specific piece of information, a serious scholar is not going to find out what the author has to say about it. Therefore, the scholar is not going to refer to this book in whatever it is he writes. The author would like to influence the thinking of serious writers. For a nonfiction author, footnotes in other people's books are the name of the game.
I will now provide a specific example of exactly this problem. After I wrote the previous paragraph, I remembered something. In her biography of her husband, Margit von Mises mentioned the fact that Mises had a specific opinion about how a scholar assesses his own influence. As I recalled it, this exchange took place after she saw him reading somebody else's book.
When I once told Lu: "Lu darling, even you have to agree, you are famous." He smiled and answered: "You can recognize the importance of an author only by the frequency of references to his work by other scholars written at the end of a page-under the line."
So, I went to the Mises.org site, downloaded the PDF of her biography, and looked for an index. There is no index. So, I searched for the word "reading." Because the book is in PDF, it is possible to do a word search. There were 27 references. I clicked on each of them, one by one, but I never found what I was looking for. So, I went over to my bookshelf, where there is a large section of books by Mises, and I reached for the biography by Mrs. Mises. I pulled it down, went back to my desk, and opened it. I make marginal notations in important books, following Rushdoony's lead. In this case, I had also put three yellow sticky notes on specific pages. I did that because, in 2016, I delivered a lecture at the Mises Institute on my meetings with Mises. I also covered his influence. On the very first page where there was a sticky note, I found the reference I had remembered. I had remembered it incorrectly. It was not in reference to something he was reading. So, I had used the wrong search term. I would not have found that reference if I had not marked up my copy of the book. The reference appears on page 156.
If I had been assigned the task to index that book, and if I had done my work well, I would've had several references to this passage. Because the entire book is on Mises, I would not have adopted this category: Mises. I would have adopted the following references: academia, footnotes (which were not mentioned, only described), influence.
Then there is this problem. Some books must be printed. If they are not printed, they will not wind up on the shelves of research libraries. Also, almost nobody makes underlines or notes on digital books. Hardly anybody ever prints out an entire PDF book. I do. I own a $60 three-hole punch. I own a lot of empty three-ring binder notebooks. I have shelves of these filled binders in my bookcases. But I am not representative of most readers. So, if an author wants scholars to read his books, he has to have them in the libraries. If they are printed, there's no way to search them electronically. So, he has to write an index.
A classic example of an intellectually important book with no influence whatsoever was written by my friend, F. N. Lee: Communist Eschatology (1974). The book is 1300 pages long. It has 300 pages of bibliographical entries. It is an astounding piece of work, but you never see it quoted, except by me. No scholars quote it because almost no scholar is going to read a 1300-page book, or even a 1000-page book, omitting the bibliographical entries. He spent a lot of time writing the book, and the publisher, who was also my publisher, spent a lot of money printing it. It was not reprinted. To buy it on Amazon, you have to pay $250. Because of the World Wide Web, you can download it, chapter by chapter, but I doubt that anybody is going to do it. In any case, there is still no index. Because it is not in PDF, there can never be an index, because HTML prints out differently on different computers. Page numbers will not match what gets printed out, computer by computer. I recommend that you read it if you ever want to understand the importance of eschatology in the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. You can download it here.
I learned how to index by copying the indexes in Mises's Human Action and Murray Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State. The indexes were prepared by a woman who was associated with the Foundation for Economic Education. Her name was Vernelia Crawford. If I had not read them both in the summer of 1963, I might never have developed the skill of writing an index. I wrote my first index for my first book four or five years later: Marx's Religion of Revolution, which was published in 1968.
I hate to do indexing. I hated it more than any other aspect of scholarship until the 1990's. I finally came to grips emotionally with the task when I began typesetting my own books and other people's books, beginning in 1990. I can tolerate it now only because I use indexing time to listen to old records that, in some cases, I have not listened to in 50 years, in all cases not in 20 years. I can index while listening to music. I cannot research and write while listening to music.
CONCLUSION
This gets me to a point. I suspect that in every profession, the people who are successful practitioners hate at least one aspect of their work. But they understand this: if they want to produce a superior product, they have to devote time and effort to this most hated aspect of their work. It is the price that they pay for success. As we say, it comes with the territory.
If you have identified such an area in your life, and you have not really come to grips with it, it is time to grin and bear it.