I believe that you can tell a great deal about a book by reading its index. A good index should allow the reader to quickly find what they want to find in a book. To create such an index means understanding both the contents of the book, and also how readers will be using the book.

Click here for the index we’ve created for my new book, Composition & Photography. This index is preliminary, and is subject to revision.

With the index to Composition & Photography we have tried to be genuinely useful to the reader. However, according to a professional indexer who is a character in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle, one should never index one’s own book: “It’s a revealing thing, an author’s index of his own work…It’s a shameless exhibition—to the trained eye.”