It’s that time when publishers flood bookshops with celebrity memoirs. We all know a sleb autobiography is rarely the work of the celebrity, but the ghostwriter is not the only anonymous voice at work – an indexer can play a quietly subversive part too.
One of my favourite index moments is in Shaun Ryder’s autobiography (Twisting My Melon – of course!), towards the end of the S’s: ‘sinus problems, 2; splitting up with Denise, 63; splitting up with Felicia, 320; splitting up with Oriole, 295; splitting up with Trish, 246-7; sunburnt in Valencia, 141-2; teeth, 327-8; thyroid problem, 320, 326; UFOs seen, 33-4.’
Teeth, UFOs, hypochondria, and failed relationships on a doomed, never-learn loop. Of course, it is part of the nature of an index – the arbitrariness of alphabetical order – to bring together curious juxtapositions. Items and events separated by time are forced to rub along together. But the Shaun Ryder index is so arch it is hard to resist the conclusion that there was a deliberate arrangement.
An index that mocks its subject isn’t a new concept. The first example can be found at the back of Dr Bentley’s Dissertations on the Epistles of Phalaris, Examin’d (1698), a takedown of the King’s librarian. The authors used the index as a kind of hyper-abbreviated character assassination: ‘his egregious dullness, p.74, 106, 119, 135, 136, 137, 241’, ‘his pedantry, from p.93 to 99, 144, 216’ and ‘his familiar acquaintance with books that he never saw, p.76, 98, 115, 232’.
The device caught on. In 1700, an anonymous pamphlet attacked the quackery that had begun to appear in the Royal Society’s journal. Its snarky index directs readers to: ‘Picking the Ears too much, Dangerous, p.15’, and ‘Mr Ray’s definition of a Dildoe, p.
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