Indexing fiction: a story of
complexity
ABSTRACT: Considers the problems and benefits of preparing indexes
to fiction, with reference to the novels of A.S. Byatt.
Fiction is approached by its readers in many ways -- enjoyed, reviewed,
studied, analysed, criticized-rarely, however, indexed. Why not?
The necessity to provide indexes for any serious works of nonfiction
that are likely to be consulted or reread has long been established.
Both these criteria apply equally to good fiction. So why is so
little of it indexed?
The indexing of fiction has indeed been undertaken from time to
time. There are three major types of such indexes: at one extreme
the seriously informative, dictionary-type, consolidated indexes
to such major, in quality and quantity, works as those of Proust,
Hardy and Dickens. These may extend to dictionaries of characters,
and such complete expositions as Hilary Spurling's detailed and
valuable guide to works of art, places, characters and events in
her Handbook to (Anthony Powell's) Music of Time.(1)
At the other extreme lies the 'index as game' jeu d'esprit,
as in Clive James's Brilliant Creatures,(2) Malcolm Bradbury's
Mensonge,(3) Perec's Life: a user's manual(4) - intended
mainly to coruscate and amuse-and indeed amusing indexers immensely.
Between these types lie serious, individual novels which might be
indexed in the same way as biographies or histories, as narratives
concerning groups of people.
In the October 1989 issue of The Indexer, Philip Bradley
surveyed 'Indexes to works of fiction: the views of producers and
users on the need for them', concluding, 'Indexes to fiction ...
on the whole are not wanted by novelists, reviewers, readers or
publishers ... there was a feeling that novels are not the sort
of books that need to be indexed'.(5) In our following issue Anthony
Raven retorted, 'Within the context of a book, i.e. within the purview
of its index, all facts are equally factual, regardless of whether
they also enjoy a different kind of factuality beyond the book's
covers'.(6) There are indeed those who require indexes to fiction.
I turned to the indexing of works of fiction unsolicited, on the
pleasure principle. If I must lend so much attention to a text,
I wanted it to be a worthwhile and rewarding one. I looked for novels
so complex and loaded with ideas as well as characters as to need
helpful adjuncts -- and fell on the books of A.S. Byatt.
The texts in hand
Two of her novels in particular, The virgin in the garden(7)
and Still life met all my criteria. These are the first two
of a planned sequence of four, with recurrent characters, and so
much meet for indexing besides - so many references to D.H. Lawrence,
such unexpected references to King Lear, such obscure ones as Mercurius,
Caedmon, Heard, such scholarly disquisitions on language and metaphor,
perception of colour, the first Elizabethan age. The books combined
fascinating readability and imaginative grip with such intellectual
complexity as to require indexes to unravel the elements of fiction,
history, social history, art, aesthetics, images, symbols, themes,
all so integrally merged. And the novels were large - the first
had 428 pages, the second 358.
The virgin in the garden is set in North Yorkshire in 1952-3,
Coronation Year. The plot concerns the Festival production of a
play about Elizabeth I, allowing consideration of that period and
of the problems of modern poetic language. The underlying theme
is of metamorphosis, birth and death. There is social history as
a record of the 1950s; treatment of one character involves the problems
of the graduate housewife. Still life extends its scene to France,
Cambridge University, and London, with the devising of a play about
Van Gogh as one major theme, involving consideration of his-and
all-art. The weight, length, seriousness and complexity of these
novels made them fit works for indexing.
I found the work of indexing them so fascinating, indeed, that I
went on to index Byatt's other books; her earlier two, Shadow
of a sun,(9) about a girl growing up dominated by her famous
novelist father, and The game, (10) the story of two sisters
of different characters and careers with recurring patterns of events,
set in Northumberland, Oxford University and London; and the Booker
Prize winner for 1990, Possession."This last is an extraordinarily
complex work, concerned basically with biographical research, so
that the truth is discovered and the narrative proceeds by careful
reading of early papers of all sorts. Diaries, letters, stories
written by the characters, even their poetry (not a form I had previously
indexed!) all carry the story forward, as the scholars in the novel
as well as its readers switch back and forth among eras.
The indexing trouble with fiction...
My indexing experience was chiefly with biographies, where the chief
difficulty is caused by the number of entries relating to major
characters; how one should express and arrange them.(12, 13) I wondered
how far the same techniques would be applicable to indexing fiction,
or what new problems this type of text might bring. Bradley had
also considered the problems of indexing fiction in recounting his
experience in preparing an index to the Waverley novels of Sir Walter
Scott:(14) he found these to arise chiefly from lack of standardization
of page numbers, chapter numbering, spelling and nomenclature in
different editions of the same works. I found far more abstract
coils of difficulty in indexing fictional rather than historic lives.
Richness of content
At the simplest, characters in fiction may be drawn from a wider
range of social worlds than is likely to occur in a biography. In
the Virgin in the garden sequence mingle teachers, pupils, dramatists,
clergy, art lovers, housewives and a madman. Fiction also extends
further than normal biography into the sexual lives of its characters,
both in vividness of description and in degree of physical intimacy
portrayed. 'Sleeps with' was a recurring subheading-perhaps a palely
restrained one. 'With' might include the meaning, 'in bed with'.
I had to use new subheadings with characters-'conception' as the
first entry in a chronological sequence for two of the children,
very clearly designated. Babies were important in the stories, mostly
for their effects on the lives of their mothers, but they needed
new subheadings for baby life. All human life was here indeed.
Biographers and historians rarely give long thought sequences,
or detailed dreams, of their subjects, but these occur often in
fiction; historians know less of their characters, and tell us less,
than the authors of fiction who createtheir own characters, possessing
total knowledge of them, so can fully present both their inner and
outer lives.
Publications about indexing usually proclaim its function as being
the locating of information items in documents. Fictional works
contain very much more than mere information, the usual quarry of
indexers.
The text of these novels was far more complex than that of biography
also because of the amount going on in each scene; as well as basic
plot development (corresponding to the development of the career
of the main character in a biography) there were always developing
relationships, images, symbols, themes, with their significance
to be interpreted and a suitable means of recording them devised.
It was often difficult to devise a single subheading to cover even
one paragraph for one character: to select one aspect as the term
of the subheading might be to dismiss several other possible ones.
Should one take as most significant the scene of a social event,
or the occasion, or occurrences at it, or the development of relationships
there?
Indexers are supposed to select only 'significant' items from the
text for listing in the index. How to determine significance, in
such rich, detailed, widely allusive writing, is perplexing indeed.
Stephanie, restricted in Still life to home-making and child-rearing,
'became obsessed with growing things'. A page describes in detail
her garden and gardening, her year-old son crawling around sabotaging
the work, vegetables produced and consumed, climbing nasturtiums,
beautifully portrayed in bloom, bringing suggestions of 'Jack and
the Beanstalk, the prosaic and angry mother who had been given a
few seeds in exchange for a cow and had stood at the foot of a brilliant
ladder into the sky'. Dense writing indeed from which to pick out
indexing terms! For main entries I selected 'gardening' but not
'Jack and the Beanstalk'; under Stephanie's entry, 'growing things';
under son Will's, this page reference was subsumed under 'babyhood';
under 'flowers', a recurrent theme that already had several various
subheadings ('design; hermaphrodite; naming; of Flanders; sunflowers;
in Pooles' playroom; painted by Van Gogh; baby recognizes'), I added,
'grown by Stephanie'. Some of the first nasturtiums, 'not pinched
out early enough, wilted and died on long string-like stalks like
tangled spaghetti'. Ten pages later we find, 'The germ of this novel
was a fact which was also a metaphor: a young woman, with a child,
looking at a tray of earth in which unthinned seedlings on etiolated
pale stalks died in the struggle for survival: Nasturtium, Giant
Climbing, mixed'. So 'nasturtiums' and 'seedlings' also had to be
entered as significant main headings from the earlier gardening
passage, though carrots and radishes, equally prominent there, were
omitted from the index.
The subtlety and complexity of the literary form make it particularly
difficult to devise headings that fully convey 'aspect' or 'comment'-what
is said-rather than mere 'aboutness' or 'topic'- what is referred
to-as differentiated by Weinberg.(15) To resort to 'aboutness' subheadings,
notational only, of the type, 'at Whitby' or 'in Ellen's journal',
would be much the easiest course, but, as well as conveying very
little of the contents of the novels, would have the effect of reducing
the text to inappropriately discrete items of information. Full
'aspect' headings require specific indication of what happened at
the place or in the journal; a brief and suitable précis
of events or developments.
Yet even so, selection implies an incongruous reduction of significance.
Mrs Orton, Stephanie's mother-in-law, lives with Stephanie's family
for several strained months. Finally young Will causes a domestic
accident with his toy train; the grandmother falls, breaks her hip,
departs forever in an ambulance, loading Will with guilt and uttering
her final bitter words to the long-suffering Stephanie, all in a
page. Each member of the family has a subheading under their index
entry to indicate this episode. Mrs Orton's could have been expressed
several different ways, to emphasize different aspects. Her accident
and departure seemed the most crucial aspects for her; I chose 'accident'
as that implied the departure it caused, and all the rest. Such
reductions of meaning to a single word or phrase for the index do
seem incongruous, though. They compare with technical manual headings,
'ozone concentration', 'peracetic acid' much as- road signs, 'car
park' or 'toilets' contrast with 'Cathedral', in the difference
of the richness they promise to lead to. Similarly, 'first meeting
alone; first kiss' in the entries for the long-dead lovers in Possession
seem dreadfully wornclichés to lead to passages of such originality
and power; entries not worthy of the work, concise and accurate
though they are.
The significance of the text may simply overload the index term,
not to be conveyed in the index. The boy Marcus, after an experiment
in telepathy in church during Stephanie's wedding to the staunch,
physically and morally huge vicar, Daniel, cannot rid himself of
eidetic visions. His tormented gaze falls on Daniel's massive back
at the chancel, clerical-black; 'Black absorbed light and did not
reflect it. Black gave out radiant heat: it was dark and warm. The
lines of energy went into that solid flesh and ceased'. I felt that
BLACK must appear in the index, especially as colours and LIGHT
were already entered; but an eager gloss, 'absorbent powers of or
'power' seemed to belittle it and diminish the power of the passage.
I left a simple 'black 264', leaving readers to discover the full
significance and complexity of the entry.
Diffiiculties with characters and
names
Names in fiction are notional only. Bill Potter and Ted Orton in
Still life are always so referred to; in life one would expand their
names in the index to the 'real' William and Edward-but these have
no 'reality'! This affected the alphabetical placing of several
names between Bill and William, Edward and Ted. The Bishop of Calverley
had to go crudely under B: no point in research to discover his
name!
Biographies usually have one single central character; histories,
a major figure, perhaps higher in rank, to whom all others can be
related in the index (son of; secretary of). The Potter family in
Byatt's novel sequence had five members, each important in the text,
but with two sisters as the leading characters. Nevertheless, I
designated characters in the index by their relationship to the
paterfamilias, resenting the implied patriarchalism and false attribution
of significance, but finding (daughter/son of Bill) for each shorter
than describing Bill as (father of Stephanie, Frederica and Marcus),
and Winifred (wife of Bill) shorter than (mother of. . .).
The two Victorian writers who are the subjects of research in
Possession I treated quite seriously as if writers in normal
biographies, subdividing their many subheadings into paragraphs
for career, relics, letters, works. Their 'works' I listed in authentic
indexing fashion, alphabetically, under their authors' names (by
first line, when extracts only were quoted, untitled).
Characters of all sorts -- historical, mythical, fictional, literary-mingled
in the text with the larger, abstract themes. I saw no necessity
to distinguish types of character typographically in the index,
and let the Bishop, Robin Day, Elizabeth I and II Thomas Hardy,
Jan Morris, Bill Potter, Marcel Proust, Sir Walter Raleigh, Mother
Shipton, Venus, parade undifferentiated. A particularly delightful
sequence was Faerie Queene, The (Spenser); Father Christmas (department
store).
Multi-layered form
Characters in fiction are presented and interpreted in many various
ways and at many levels. Whereas histories present all actions in
direct narrative form (and, usually, sequence) or in letters and
diaries, fiction may present its events also as recounted in characters'
conversations, memories, thoughts or dreams; all of these may be
given in close, significant detail. One must enter the occurrence
of the conversation under all its participants, and enter the letters
under the writers and recipients, as well as indexing the actual
topics discussed or written of. Should one enter for a person only
references to their actual appearances and actions in the novel,
or also take as valid references mentions of them in the conversations,
dreams or thoughts of others? The answer seemed to lie entirely
with the degree of significance these held.
In Possession there was not only the complexity of the reinterpretation
of earlier stories and letters advancing the narrative, and constant
change of time of the action; the letters themselves had three separate
attributes for indexing. The events they described advanced the
story-a romance developed originally in correspondence only. Then,
the letters were also written productions of the two major characters,
both authors, whose many literary works were listed at the end of
their entries, and should include their letters. Thirdly, the physical
papers containing the letters were the object of a quest through
the novel, needing subheadings such as DISCOVERED, STUDIED, MARKETED,
BURIED IN
GRAVE.
So much that happens in these novels is implicit only, or comprehensible
only in the light of later developments, that for some entries bald
assumptions must be made. Piecing together the story of the 19th-century
authors' romance in Possession, the researchers assume that the
weeping lady at a seance was indeed Christabel, the subject of their
study. This is never textually confirmed; but I listed AT MRS LEE'S
SEANCE firmly under Christabel in the index, as with other unconfirmed
assumptions in the books.
The structure of the whole, and the unity of each chapter, were
deliberately engineered by a literary writer, in a way the factual
recording of historic events does not need to be. Links had to be
noticed and traced, and the hidden intentions of the designer of
events had to be devised, in deciding where true emphasis should
be placed, as in life they would be only in a theological context!
Order of subheadings
Problems of the devising and arrangement of subheadings for the
several major characters in the books were as complex as those encountered
in biographies-so many to devise, so many possibilities of arranging
them: alphabetically? in order of occurrence in the text? chronologically?
subdvided by topic? Since the order of the narrative was a deliberately
contrived literary work, not a straight recounting of sequential
events, the problem seemed to require a more delicate solution than
the normal biography.
Subheadings in histories and biographies are usually arranged chronologically.
In historical contexts, even dates have their own significance for
the text (1066, 1914-18), without glosses or details being needed.
In fiction, not only are most dates meaningless outside the context
of the work, but the narrative is not always simply chronological.
Flashbacks are a frequent form; memories and thoughts of characters
play a large part. Often the content of the thought, as well as
its occurrence ('remembers dead sister') needs to be indexed; two
periods are simultaneously presented in the text: the time when
someone is engaged in reflection, and the time they are remembering.
The childhood of the characters in Byatt's books is presented chiefly
in memories occurring during conversations. My biographical subheadings
are chronologically arranged (beginning in two cases, as stated
above, 'conception'), with 'childhood' an early one; but this chronological
order usually does not coincide with page order, as it does in indexes
to histories. Establishing chronological order for subheadings under
the 19th-century characters whose lives are later investigated in
Possession took a great deal of disentanglement!
Language fit for literature
Current indexing practice, as enjoined by the most recent British
Standard on indexing, abjures the inclusion of the definite article
in indexes, and encourages the omission of prepositions in subheadings.
This may result in indexes that rap out basic elements of information
in staccato fashion, meant for scanning and consultation rather
than reading. The absence of prepositions produces a vague suggestion
of connection, 'related in some way to'. I felt that the language
of the indexes for novels must flow in natural reading fashion;
I was not attempting to boil down the text and extract basic information
items, but to mirror its text in miniature and guide readers through
a beautifully realized world of characters and ideas. The terms
used should match the text in precision, too. For example, The virgin
in the garden shows Frederica reflecting on 'her behaviour with,
and with regard to, Alexander'-a most careful and deliberate choice
of prepositions.
Standardization, also much advocated nowadays for J indexing, is
opposed to subtlety and differentiation. For this index I used in
subheadings 'attitude to; view of; with; relationship with' as each
seemed appropriate, regardless of which had been used in somewhat
similar entries. 'Teacher at'; `teaching at'-one term may indicate
a career stage, the other an activity engaged in on that page. As
a subheading, 'at William's birth' indicates 'at the time of; in
the situation caused by', rather than 'present at'. 'And', despised
by some in subheadings, can cover at once several aspects of relationship
or dealings with, as well as the presence of the other party, or
thoughts about them, and avoid excluding any aspect; it is a useful
conjunction if several of these elements are relevant at the same
time, and none should be excluded.
On the other hand, use of the same subheading to cover several passages
of the text may clumsily mask a subtle variation in apparently similar
passages. After the first performance of 4sf raea in The virgin
in the garden, an argument develops among twelve named people. In
a biography, probably one could repeat for each of them the subheading,
'after first performance of Astraea'. With fiction, where the life
and development of each individual character is separately, imaginatively
presented, each may need a different description of that episode
according to the significance it holds for them.
The selection of terminology requires value-judgements. The boy
Marcus and his biology teacher conduct experiments with supernatural
forces. Does one list these as religion; telepathy; madness; spiritualism;
occult? The author's intentions and attitudes must be divined and
reflected in the vocabulary used.
Developing themes
The themes were abstract and complex, and quite differently treated
among different characters and scenes of the novel. One of the more
abstract and dispersed entries, COLOURS, is, for The virgin in the
garden:
colours: in Astraea 102; Elizabethan significance 111-12; Festival
of Britain 66; Simmonds' madness
401; Wilkie's optical experiments 130-1
followed by, in Still life:
seen by baby 107-8; names of 108, 163-4; Wedderburn thinks of 69-70;
discussed at beach party 75, 79-80; in Pooles' flat 171-4; in Van
Gogh's paintings 2, 69-70; to Van Gogh 79, 84, 109, 167; in The
yellow chair 166-7, 3 10-12
How far to index symbols and metaphors became a very delicate question.
Spiders, for instance, occur in Possession as natural species
for study beneath a microscope; in the wild on Yorkshire Moors;
and many times as symbols for the fierce female writer in the book.
Such clear references I listed in the index; but hesitated at the
faint suggestion and echo, such as the researcher walled in by filing
cabinets, guarding her treasured papers, denying access to a querying
colleague who fears the answer he seeks 'may have fallen through
her web of categories'. There are recurrent apples, golden and natural,
mythical and real, echoes and implications. It seemed too crude
to point out gleefully each suggestion pf resemblance, each image,
each tiny mention. One must recognize the leitmotif, but not catalogue
it exhaustively.
A difficulty has been that only the first two of the proposed sequence
of four novels have yet been published, and I have no idea what
is to occur in their sequels. While indexing Still life I
realized that some entries I had not included in the index to
The virgin in the garden, because they seemed too trivial (books
by Beatrix Potter and Georgette Heyer, Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers'),
should in fact have been listed, as they recurred or were more deeply
developed in the second novel. Frederica's brief, inept attempt
at teaching in Still life seemed worth including under T only because
it contrasts with the several competent teachers in her immediate
circle shown in the first book. Two schoolgirls, Ruth and Jacqueline,
indexed thus under R and J, become important in the second novel,
and I am sure will feature further in the third, and be accorded
surnames. Colour perception, as shown above, proved a major theme
of the second novel, having already featured differently in the
first. Indexing this sequence of novels is cumulative indexing,
blind as to what may be to come.
Unexpected light was thrown on the whole opus of Byatt in finding
how many of the same headings-not those expected-recurred among
the unrelated novels. Cambridge University, Coleridge, D.H. Lawrence,
places in North Yorkshire, Venus, various forms of snakes, seemed
to recur almost in each book, indicating authonal preoccupations.
The sledge-hammer and the butterfly
Some authors consulted by Bradley objected to the idea of fiction
being indexed, as this would destroy its magic.(5) The literary
indexer may indeed feel in danger of philistinism, opposed to literacy.
Providing an index to a book may attempt two effects: to avoid people's
having to read the book through to come across its contents in the
order designed by the author; and to reduce the whole to very much
less than the sum of its parts, rearranged on some alternative basis.
Information retrieval sees books merely as collections of facts
to be selected from the store or ignored, unrelated to the remainder;
by, how revealingly, an end-user, not a reader. Technical books
may even sometimes be indexed by computer systems that cannot of
course 'read'- appreciate-the book: truly a mindless task. Literary
indexers, at the other extreme, should value the book in hand as
the finished work of the author's imagination, an aesthetic unity
with its own rhythm, pace and pattern, which should all contribute
to its effect. Do we aim to reduce a chiming clock to tidy piles
of metal pieces; elegant buildings to stones and mortar, neatly
laid in rows? How much greater a thing it is to compile than to
analyse-almost, we might say, to create than to destroy. Perhaps
these are the reasons for the indifference, almost hostility, to
indexes that authors have sometimes displayed-that they find it
painful to see their so carefully assembled spells efficiently unravelled
by us, the harmony shattered?
I can plead only that I indexed these books because they seemed
so wonderfully full of good things and ideas, and that the more
closely I examined them, the more wonderful they appeared. I tried
to avoid reducing flowing text to discrete bits of information,
and hoped that rearranging the juxtapositions of past and present
chronologically for the index was enlightening, not destructive.
Elements of mystery, undeniably, cannot survive indexing: a charming
child's riddle quoted I listed under its solution, 'egg'; and to
read the index before the text would indeed negate the sheer shock
of the sudden death of one heroine. But consulting the index to
such books before the text should be deplored anyway!
If indexes are to be held suitable adjuncts to any texts, to enable
location of specific passages and collate dispersed references to
the same theme, then surely fiction that is serious, lengthy and
complex is at least as deserving of these aids to study and research
as any other form of writing. The indexes are intended to help people
find again their particular favourite passages. Among my own are
the English lesson given by Stephanie on the Ode on a Grecian urn,
and the descriptions of the butcher's shop, decorated in discordant
modes, 'representing the English concord and harmony of veal, ham
and egg' in The virgin in the garden; the baby feeding, where 'apple
was becoming baby, fruit was going into flesh' in Still ljfe; and
stories and poems by the writers in Possession. The indexes
also bring together dispersed references to the same subject-such
as the plays of Shakespeare, or discussions of spiritualism -- to
see how they are gradually developed, or throw light upon each other.
For such scholarly novels as these, that may well be studied in
literature classes, students may find indexes helpful. The indexes
are an optional supplement to the texts, never, oh Good Lord, never
a substitute.
Conclusion
The intellectual range of these novels is peculiar to their very
scholarly author, but indexing them illustrates many problems that
would apply to indexing fiction in general. First, all those difficulties
already recognized as applying to the indexing of biographies as
narrative prose about people: length of text, extended continuity,
selection and terminology of entries, arrangement and number of
subheadings, run-on layout. (12) Further problems arising from the
indexing of fictional text are the number of characters simultaneously
focused on; the presentation of their thought processes, memories
and dreams; the juxtaposition of past and present non-sequentially;
revelation of past events only gradually by hints; subtle implication
rather than explicit statement; the inclusion of symbols, images
and abstract themes; and the need to divine-and not to bludgeon
or distort - the fundamental intentions of the creative author.
Should such indexing be done? Not for all fiction, I would say;
only the serious, complex, densely written. The resulting indexes
to such works must be helpful to students and to selective rereaders;
even to the author continuing a sequence. The indexes may be some
indication of the serious status of the books. And to the indexer,
the work is fascinating: one reads the texi repeatedly and closely;
and indexing becomes a form- albeit humble -- of literary criticism.
(And what is to happen to my indexes? Well, nothing, actually.
A. S. Byatt herself writes that she 'can't persuade publishers that
an index doesn't look like boasting/pretension/offputting academicism'.)
References
1.Spurling, Hilary. Handbook to Anthony Powell's Music of Time.
Heinemann, 1977.
2.James, Clive. Brilliant crealures. Cape, 1983. Reviewed
in The Indexer 13 (4) Oct. 1983, 277.
3.Bradbury, Malcolm. My strange quest for Mensonge, Deutsch,
1987.
4. Perec, George. Life: a user's manual. Collins Harvill,
1988. Reviewed in The Indexer 17 (1) April 1990, 72.
5. Bradley, Philip. Indexes to works of fiction: the views of producers
and users on the need for them. The Indexer 16 (4) Oct. 1989,
239-48.
6. Raven, Anthony. Indexes to works of fiction. The Indexer
17 (1) April 1990, 60-1.
7. Byatt, A.S. The virgin in the garden. Chatto & Windus,
1978; Penguin, 1981.
8. Byatt, A.S. Still life Chatto & Windus, 1983; Penguin,1986
.
9. Byatt, A.S. Shadow of a sun. Chatto & Windus, 1964.
10. Byatt, A.S. The game. Chatto & Windus, 1967; Penguin,
1983.
11. Byatt, A.S. Possession. Chatto & Windus, 1990; Vintage,
1991.
12. Bell, Hazel K. Indexing biographies: lives do bring their problems.
The lndexer 16 (3) April 1989, 168-72.
13. Bell, Hazel K. Indexing biographies: the main character. The
Indexer 17 (1) April 1990, 43-4.
14. Bradley, Philip. A long fiction index. The Indexer 8(3)
April
1973, 153-9.
15. Weinberg, Bella Hass. Why indexing fails the researcher. The
Indexer 16 (1) April 1988, 3-6.
-- by Hazel K. Bell, in The Indexer Vol. 17 No. 4 October
1991, 251-256