Now that the paperback volumes of Lovecraft’s letters are growing in both number and page-count, would a single unified online A-Z index for all the volumes be useful for researchers?

Free and public, such a mega-index would serve as a cow-catcher for sales of these print-on-demand books, and would be expanded as each new volume is published.

It shouldn’t take more than an hour to make, for an intern with access to the digital copies. Being a simple matter of copy-pasting out each back-of-the-book index to an Excel spreadsheet, thus…

Brown University 183, 196

Then use a standard plugin to place a volume identifier at the end of each index entry. Here [AG] = Alfred Galpin …

Brown University 183, 196 [AG]

Then append this index to the combined multi-book index in Excel. Once done, have Excel re-sort the whole lot by A-Z, and copy it all out to a Web page.

There would be problems with sorting items which begin “ of course. As in: “Tree, The”. But since all such entries have a closing ”, one would simply delete all initial “’s. Then, once A-Z sorted, have Excel add back the starting “ for any cell that contains a closing ” mark anywhere in it. One could do this by identifying such cells by using a simple highlight any cell containing ” formula, then add back the “ to the start of those cells.

Someone on Fivver could probably do this for $10, if sent a .ZIP file of the copy-pasted indexes (I think there are about twenty such books now?).