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