Aldis, M.A.
Cambridge: at the University Press 1916
sent out in slip form, that is, in strips before being made up
into pages; because, after the type is put into pages,
alterations which involve the transfer of lines from one page
to another are troublesome to effect. It is when the proof is
in pages that the head-lines (the descriptive line at the top
of the page) are added. These usually consist of the short
title of the book on the left-hand page, and on the right-hand
page the title of the chapter or the subject matter of the
page itself. To have merely the title of the book running on
both pages throughout the volume is a slovenly practice and
suggests careless indifference on the part of both author and
publisher. The head-line too is the right, because convenient,
place for the page numbers, and not the bottom, where they
look as if they had strayed out of the page and were trying
one of those hidden secrets known only to those who follow 'the mystery and art of printing.'
At the end of the book comes the Index, an appendage which does not always receive the attention it deserves. 'The
labor and patience, the judgment and the penetration which are required to make a good index, is only known to
those who have gone through this most painful, but least praised part of a publication,' was the considered opinion of
the eighteenth-century bibliographer William Oldys; and yet earlier Nicolas Antonio, the Spanish bibliographer, related
as the dictum of a celebrated compatriot, 'that the index of a book should be made by the author, even if the book
itself were written by some one else1.' With the exception of cyclopaedias and dictionaries, almost every book that
aims at being useful requires an index to make its store of knowledge accessible. More than one treatise has recently
been devoted to the principles of making a good index. Here it must suffice to say that, unless there are special
reasons to the contrary, it is better to have but one index than to make separate lists for persons, places, and things.
Tl.1e references should be to individual 1 H. B. Wheatley: What is an Index? (1878), p. 18. points and should not be
classified under headings; in the alphabetical arrangement each word must be considered a unit. The use of a dash
for repetition at the beginning of an entry should be confined, if used at all, to words having precisely the same
meaning.
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