Dogs in Greece, a nuisance

In ‘The Sussex Vampires’, Watson takes down from the shelf the great index volume for V; Holmes balances it on his knee and reads:

Voyage of the Gloria Scott. Victor Lynch, the forger. Venomous lizard or gila … Vittoria, the circus belle. Vanderbilt and the Yeggman … Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder…

And then he gets to ‘Vampires’.

The entries give some of that mysterious country outside the stories which, as with the nonsense verse of Edward Lear, make the oeuvre so compelling. As an index they are lacking. For a start they aren’t in strict alphabetical order, and if it was a ‘great volume’ it might take some time to get to Vampires via Venomous lizard – and in any case, why isn’t that under Lizard, venomous?

Utility is not the only purpose of indexes. As Hazel K. Bell shows, they have entertainment value. And there is a strange beauty in the cumulative piling up of off-beat entries:

Bag, souls of persons deposited in aBirds, cause headache through clipped hairCat’s cradle, forbidden to boys among the EsqimauxCharms, to prevent the sun from going down Conception in a woman caused by treesFairies, averse to ironMagnets thought to keep brothers at unitySardines, worshipped by Indians of Peru

Those come from Sir James Frazer’s single-volume epitome of The Golden Bough, that wrong-headed work. And these come from an index to the opinionated De Quincey:

Dogs in Greece, a nuisanceHorses, weepingLeibnitz, died partly from the fear of not being murderedMahomet not a great manMuffins, eating, a cause of suicideSpitting, art ofWomen, can die grandly

It does make one want to read the book. The index to Enquire Within Upon Everything (78th edition, 1888) might make one wonder about relying on it at all:

Beds for the Poor, How to MakeBone, to Stain In Throat, How to Act Character, Manly, Elements ofCheese, Blue Mould onDaughters, Management ofDirty People to be AvoidedDutch People, Cleanliness ofFalling into Water, How to ActPersons on FireQuadrupeds, to StuffQuotations, Greek and Latin, to be avoidedTaste of Medicine, to PreventWindow-Curtains on Fire, How to Act

Do you think it would be easier to find the right entry if a bone was in your throat or if you were in deep water? Anyway, in the 19th century there were still a scandalous proportion of books of history, biography and so on with no index.