BOB will triumph

Every time I do a ‘CTRL F’ search, allowing my computer to achieve in milliseconds what it took the schoolboy me hours to do (find a particular word among pages and pages of text), I think of a small business centre in Sheffield, and imagine its occupants to be shaking in fear at the onward march of e-books. For it’s in this business centre that the Society of Indexers is to be found. (I know — you think they’d have a dusty garret somewhere in St James’s.) With Kindles and iPads able to instantly locate every occurrence in a book of whichever word or phrase you’re looking for, surely the days of the index are (please forgive this, it really isn’t deliberate) numbered? A whole tribe of artisans whose working days are characterised by such phrases as ‘Shaw, George Bernard, 57-9, 113’ are about, you’d assume, to be thrown onto the publishing scrapheap.