Another part of Monday's haul from the Raynes Park Platform Library was a slim blue hardback, a nicely made book in good condition, a copy of reference 1. In which every piece in either journal or proceedings is indexed by both the proper name of the plant in question and by the author. Plus all the RHS awards and rewards indexed by proper name of the plant in question.
Not perfect, as the index is organised into chunks by date of publication or award, and in order to check something or look for something, if you were not sure of the date, you might need to look into each of several chunks. No easy answer to that one before computers and online access took over jobs of this sort.
The index proper, as snapped above, appears to be typescript in two columns. Was the book produced photographically from actual typescript, typed out by patient & accurate typists? I don't think you would reverse engineer a computer file so that, when printed out, it looked like typescript.
And then who would want such a book - of which I had only taken one of the two available? There may have been more. Was the owner of the botanical books picked up on the occasion noticed at reference 2 into this sort of thing as well? Are we looking at the personal library of a senior fellow of the Society?
But the test is to work out how the index has been coded up, from this sample of two whole pages and two part pages, taken from different places. I don't think I would have passed, given what I learned from the crib at the beginning.
References
Reference 1: Index to the Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Horticutural Society and List of Awards: Supplement for 1966-1974 - Royal Horticultural Society - 1980.
Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/08/cheese-time-again.html.
Group search key: wga.
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