Further to the opening paragraph, a claim to fame: I once folded (former British prime minister) Harold Macmillan’s underpants. Long retired and Lord Stockton by then.
The ultimate ode to the index would be Nabokov's "Pale Fire", in which the rereader is encouraged to have three books open, one for the index, one for the place where you are, and another for your lookups.
Kurt Vonnegut reportedly sat next to an indexer on a plane once, who convinced him of the value of indexes. After that he made sure his novels had indexes
Almost: This anecdote is in the novel _Cat's Cradle_. His subsequent novels did not have indexes that I recall.