Timely TLS Letter about Indexing

There’s a bitter complaint from the erratic John Sutherland in the TLS that got here today, the issue for 6 July 2012. This time Sutherland is right-headed about presses (Stanford, Princeton, and Oxford are named) for not indexing endnotes: “There is, probably, a cost issue. But it constitutes a disservice to the authors whom the publishers, in other ways, serve so well” and a disservice to users who might want to know which fellow scholars figure in the endnotes (where “most of the skirmishing” is relegated) and want to know which “conceptual topics important to the books’ arguments” figure there. 

The indexing of the endnotes in MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE is good with conceptual topics such as the New Criticism and the New Historicism and the relationship between history and biography as well as with skirmishing scholars, among whom Sutherland in one of his low-bottom reviewing moments figures briefly but memorably.

Sutherland says the Society of Indexers regularly protests to academic publishers about the trend toward not indexing the endnotes. Good for Northwestern University Press.

Simon Morley, the graduate student TLS gave THE POWELL PAPERS to, did not read it all and did not mention the highly amusing and informative index on which I lavished six weeks. Dr. Valorous Coolidge, in particular, ought to have been celebrated in the review. Where else do you learn about a murderer who took money for doing the autopsy on the corpse of his victim?