How to organise everything — Judith Flanders’s history of finding things

In the middle of the last century, Robert Collison, one of the founders of the Society of Indexers, addressed himself to the question of what, exactly, an index is. In Collison’s loosest formulation, every time we organise the world around us so that we know where to find things, we are in fact indexing. He offers a pair of illustrations that could hardly be more 1950s if they were wearing brothel creepers:

When a housewife makes a separate place for everything in the kitchen she is in fact creating a living index, for not only she, but all her household, will gradually get used to the system she has created and be able to discover things for themselves… A man will get into the habit of always putting change in one pocket, keys in another, cigarette-case in a third — an elementary indexing habit which stands him in good stead when he checks up in his hurry to the station to see whether he has remembered his season-ticket.