Quote 265 of 497

The eleventh and final volume of the edition is the Index, on which I
worked for about four years, with my wife, poor wretch.  This was my
first attempt at a big index—I suspect nobody survives to do
more than one anyway.  Indexes combine the pleasures of a jigsaw
puzzle with those of a Victorian paper game.  You play around with
hundreds of page-references so that they fit into a design, and you
have to find the appropriate word or phrase to indicate the subject of
the references.

[Compiling the index] meant, for one thing, listening to the diary
being read aloud.  My wife read it while I, at the other side of the
table, made notes… I discovered—what I ought to have known
before—that my ears read better than my eyes.  We teach our eyes
from early youth to read quickly, and therefore miss a lot. When we
depend on our eyes we drop to the pace of the spoken word, and catch
details which have escaped our eyes.  I found, for instance, that when
my wife’s voice told me (as she read) that Pepys’s
neighbour Sir Richard Ford, a merchant acting as a tax assessor, had
put Pepys’s rate higher than Pepys thought fair, I remembered
her voice telling me a day or two before that Pepys had annoyed Sir
Richard by condemning the hemp he had sold to the navy. Sir Richard
may have been getting his own back.

A further concern was to make sure that each reference was indexed in
the right place.  How, for instance, do you index Pepys’s
references to his health?  Remedies are easy—you have only to
list names: balsam, enemas, rabbits’ feet and so on.  But
diseases can be difficult: you have only Pepys’s description of
his symptoms to go on and you have to decide when he writes of
‘taking cold’ whether to index it under
‘colds/coughs/sore throats’, or under ‘colic’,
or whether to leave it doubtful.

Several people told me when I started work on the Index that I ought
to use a computer.  But it would have been extremely difficult (as
well as expensive and time-consuming) to program the machine.  I doubt
in fact if a computer can be used for indexing a title like Pepys, in
which there are so many indirect, submerged and ambiguous references.
To have determined who was meant by ‘my Uncle’ or by
‘the Duke’ or by unattached pronouns and so on, would have
meant continually going back to the text.  A computer print-out would
have been awkward to handle, with its rows of figures in which the eye
loses its way.  Again, I was advised to have the index made for me by
someone else—by an expert of indexes. But Pepys’s diary
can only be indexed from the inside—from a knowledge of its
contents and their interconnections.  I had already come to this
conclusion when I read the opening sentence of the manual on indexing
published by the Cambridge University Press.  There the author, G V
Carey, says in effect: ‘Get someone else to write your book for
you if you like—but be sure to write your own index.’

Well, I wrote the Index: but the important thing is that it was
Pepys who wrote the book.
		-- Robert Latham, "Pepys and His Editors", pamphlet
		   from Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge

Tags: pace navy pleasures diseases ears indexes spokenword rabbits neighbour hemp colds coughs sorethroats sirrichard pagereferences healthremedies jigsawpuzzle papergame richardford poorwretch