I was looking for something today in my massive Darwin book–wait, start over, let me tell you how much I love my massive Darwin book. It was a gift from Matt a few years ago, and a stellar one. Darwin’s four major books (Beagle, Origin, Descent, Emotions) in one really lovely volume, complete with a pretty slipcase. And an introduction by E. O. Wilson, and all of Darwin’s original illustrations, and the original forewords and indices, and interstitial essays by Wilson. I love this to pieces.
One of my favorite things about this collection is the general index. Wilson himself apparently indexed this work, which (having done a bit of book indexing myself) I have a little trouble believing, but it’s awesome in the way that all large indices are awesome. All of those disparate ideas, thrown together by the sheer willy-nilly randomness of the alphabet. For example:
Or the entirety of the “K” section:
It’s this kind of jumble, I think, that inspired us to put together an index for Twenty Epics, although I suppose ours was a little weirder, what with all the space opera and metafiction.
Posted Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 at 4:24 pm. Filed under: Uncategorized.
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That’s the *entirety* of the Ks? In a corpus at least twelve hundred pages long?
On a wild tangent, there’s an interesting version of the taxi-number problem here: given a random sample of page numbers from a text, what’s the likely length of the book? Of course, index items aren’t placed entirely randomly….
*wanders off, mumbling*