To Index or not to Index...

So, how do you feel about books and their indexes? Usually I am a bit of an index snob, plus a bibliography one as well, so to publish a fact-intensive book with a minimal index and a sampling bibliography is pretty inconsistent.

The recently published In their Landscape: the churches, chapels and ruined places of worship in the South Downs National Park has taken 11 years of work. It includes 273+ churches, chapels and ruins. As it stands it is 325 pages long and 1kg in weight.

For each of most of the churches I will have read and attempted to digest on average 200 sources. This is why the bibliography is a sample. A good number of those sources repeated each other, so maybe those would not have to be acknowledged, but it's hard to know with digital sources who would be the first to say something, given the updates can change the dates of origin (although I realise that this isn't always the case).

An index that doubles as a tick-box and notes-table has no room for extraneous information interrupting things and I do not have the budget for another 20-30 pages of print in the book either, so the temptation to have a split index wouldn't work!

But.

I am really really missing an index! Where does Rev. Gilbert White get a mention? I know about Farringdon and Selborne and sometimes remember about Oakhanger, and of course there's his aunt and Timothy the Tortoise in Ringmer, but he was also for a short time a curate near to Northington and wrote about other local buildings connected to his ecclesiastical family. Yes, I can open up the computer and do a digital search, but of course I also know that at some point someone will have read enough of the book to want to look things up again, in one of the headslap moments when things we believe we will remember are already forgotten ten minutes later. I used to write a diary on 'things I learned today' for a spattering weeks. It had to stop because by the end of the day I had forgotten most of what I had learned and I just sat there wanting to sob.

An index is of course needed.

As things stand two days before 2026 starts I have got to page 62 on the first run through, using the very helpful tools in InDesign (I believe Word can do indexing, I just don't like automating Word files very much). By the end of January I really hope that there is one up and ready and I remember to update this blog (that will be a good date tester, won't it!) and link to the web page where it will have gone for anyone to use as they wish to. As well as Trollope, Austen, Stephenson, White, Manning and Wilberforce there will be adultery, divorce, murder, smuggler, riot, saints, charity and all manner of other ecclesiastical and gossip terms as well as landscape history elements scattered throughout. Any requests would be gratefully received as well. The Victorian incumbents are to be included too, so arguably a bit of genealogy achievable.

Watch this space, but not obsessively...