Douglas Matthews, index compiler sought after for the precision and wit of his entries – obituary

Douglas Matthews, who has died aged 93, was a scholarly librarian turned indexer variously described by grateful authors in their acknowledgements as the “prince” or “king” of indexers, “every author’s dream indexer”, or “the nonpareil of indexers”.

A good indexer is very often the most thorough early reader of a printed text, and the point of a good index is that it is analytic, conceptual and evaluative.

If, for example, a reader of Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens wants to know how much money the author was paid, a computer search engine would offer no clues. Matthews’s index gives the word “earnings”. Job done.

Matthews himself gave an example of such interpretative indexing, in his work on Laurence Olivier’s autobiography, Confessions of an Actor.

The book included Olivier’s two-page account of how he met Vivien Leigh while he was still married to his first wife, Jill Esmond: “I soon began to feel sorry for Jill, and of course guilt … Two years of furtive life, lying life … we could not keep from touching each other, making love almost within Jill’s vision.”

Those were the only references to Olivier’s first wife in the relevant pages and her index entry could not omit them. The subheading that Matthews contrived for Esmond, Jill, was “supplanted by Vivien Leigh”.

From 1957, when he worked on his first index, Matthews reckoned he had compiled somewhere between 600 and 1,000, moonlighting alongside his day job as Librarian (that is, senior manager or chief executive) of the London Library. A Matthews index is said to be readily identifiable by cognoscenti for its concision, efficacy and wit.

He did much of his work on the train on the daily journeys between his home in Lewes and Victoria, along with evenings and weekends, and reckoned the average index took him a fortnight to compile.

“Starting on page one you have to be aware of the ideas that might be of interest to people, “ he told an interviewer in 2017, “and break the book into sub-categories.” He also observed that a good indexer does more than compile the index, but acts as a “longstop copy editor”, finding unnoticed errors or inconsistencies in the text in time to alert the author.

Matthews’s favourite job was indexing eight volumes of the Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson: “They were glorious. There’s not a bad line in the whole thing.”

His least favourite was indexing an English language version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, a task, he confessed in the Society of Authors’ quarterly magazine, which “almost forced me to abandon professional objectivity… It was tempting to slant the entries, for example, to make a subheading ‘poisonous hatred of Jews’; but that would be inappropriate, while the neutral ‘anti-Semitism’ is exact and, I think, more effective because it is cooler. The text should say it all; the index merely directs the reader to where to look.”

His professional objectivity was also tested when he came across a reference to himself in James Lees-Milne’s diaries. He had had a disagreement with Kenneth Rose over an index entry to Rose’s biography of George V, and working on the diaries he found the words: “Talking to Kenneth Rose. He said, ‘I think Douglas Matthews is the most overrated indexer…’ ”

“One doesn’t like to see that in print,” Matthews admitted, “but I put it in the index anyway.”

Douglas Matthews was born in Middlesbrough on August 23 1927 to Benjamin Matthews, an accountant with Bass Charrington, and Mary (née Pearson), a former nurse.

From Acklam Hall School, Middlesbrough, he read Geography at Durham University, intending to become a teacher. Instead, following a course at the former North West London Polytechnic, he became a librarian, joining the India Office Library as assistant librarian in 1952.

During his 10 years at the India Office, he spent a year at the Royal Library in Stockholm, where he was approached by a historian needing someone to compile the index to his English-language study of power politics before the First World War. Matthews agreed to have a go and learnt to index by doing it, applying the principles of cataloguing and subject indexing he used as a librarian.

Returning to London in 1962, he worked in the Home Office library for a couple of years before being appointed deputy librarian at the London Library in 1965. He was given what he called “flag rank” as Librarian in 1980 and remained at the library until his retirement in 1993.

As a retirement present he was given a PC and a printer, and became a devotee of the Macrex indexing program, although he insisted that there could be no substitute to close analytical reading by a professional indexer.

Matthews claimed that his education really began with indexing and that he had never worked on a book which he had not learnt something from. He ranged from history and biography to art and religion, and from philosophy and scientific works that he could “understand as a layman” to a 44-volume edition of Daniel Defoe.

As a stalwart of the Society of Sussex Authors, he would set the quizzes at the society’s annual Christmas party and provided questions for Bamber Gascoigne in the early days of University Challenge.

On one occasion he enjoyed a book so much that he refused to take a fee: “This nearly involved me in a duel with the author, who insisted on paying me, but eventually settled for several bottles of good scotch instead.”

A Trustee of the Royal Literary Fund and Registrar of the fund from 2004 to 2014, in 1999 Matthews was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was appointed MBE in 2013 for services to literature.

In 1968, he married Sarah Williams. The marriage was dissolved in 1991. Their two daughters survive him.

Douglas Matthews, born August 23 1927, died November 7 2020