In a conversation at the clubhouseLibrary Society of the World chatroom some time last week, talk turned to David Weinberger’s book Everything is Miscellaneous and Walt Crawford said that he’d look up some topic in the index. Then Walt joked that perhaps such a book wouldn’t even have an index, being all miscellaneous and everything.

Of course, the book does have an index. As all of us who read walking paper remember, the index features Sarah Houghton-Jan (you can call her the Librarian in Black as well as K. G. “Free Range Librarian” Schneider.

But it is also an index with a sense of humor. In addition to amusing-but-legit entries such as “intertwingularity, 125-28″ and “Gdansk vs.Danzig edit war, 138″ and “sort-of, kind-of relationships, 196-98″ there are a few entries planted just for yucks.

Pictured here is the first one that I noticed, when I went to look up “index” or “indexing” in the index itself, and found “index, entries that should not have been included”:

One of those is “everything.” Look up “everything” in the index, and find, among other sub-headings, “in book, 1-277″ for the 277-page book.

There is also fun with names, starting witih “companies, names of which are made-up words”:

and continuing with “names of people” (where the subheadings include “that are also animals” and “wonderful”) and “people” (subheadings include “anonymous,” “knighted,” and “you want to be”).

If that’s all too silly for you, you might want to check out the entry for “parody, good pages of this book to, 24-26, 126, 211.”

Eventually I’ll have more to say about the book. For right now, I’ll say it is a pretty good read. It’s more journalism, more pop-non-fiction than I realized it would be. I think he gives a good tour of issues surrounding metadata and organization in the Internet age that librarians have been kicking around for a while now (without really coming to terms with most of those issues, I’d say). He does tend to be a bit breathless over some of the possibilities of what he calls the “third order” of organization without taking adequate notice of what Cory Doctorow calls metacrap (in a nutshell, people are lazy stupid liars). But I’ll try and take it up at some length later. (I am fully aware that when I say on this blog that I’m going to write something up “later” that tends to mean “never.” Time will tell in this case.)