Finding Your Needle in Chesterton’s Haystack
A Peek at Joseph W. Sprug’s Remarkable 1966 Index to 92 Books by Larger-than-Life G.K. Chesterton
Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
—G.K. Chesterton
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was big in every way. He, of course, was simply big, standing six feet four inches and weighing nearly three hundred pounds. But the largeness of his presence on the literary stage of London in the teens and twenties is hard for us to fathom.
He was a literary celebrity of a kind that is rarely seen today. He went toe to toe with the likes of Bernard Shaw with whom he publicly debated for going on two decades. He was caricatured by seemingly every artist of the day. He was also big of heart, certainly. So big, in fact, that there are rumblings of a canonization cause.
For the bibliophile GKC was also big in another significant way: He was prodigious in literary output. He was also eminently quotable. (Oh, to have had him on Twitter!) Those two combined means that if there is a topic of importance Chesterton probably had something to say about it and almost certainly he said something witty to offer.
Ah, but finding it! There’s the challenge.
Enter An Index to G.K. Chesterton, edited by Joseph W. Sprug, and published by the Catholic University of America Press in 1966. Chesterton had died some thirty years prior to the book’s publication and his reputation wasn’t what it had been (or is now). The book certainly provided a portal for a new generation to enter the Chestertonian universe.
An Index to G.K. Chesterton is not a bibliography as we might think of one. There was, apparently, no effort to track down the rare or obscure. Instead, the book is exactly what the title declares: It is an index, arranged by topic in alphabetical order, and citing a Chesterton book with a page number and often providing some clue to the subtopic. It’s essentially the same as any index in the back of any book, except that it draws from dozens and dozens of Chesterton’s works.
How many books? Well, it purports to cover every published book by Chesterton from 1900 to the then most recent posthumous collection. I counted and came up with ninety-two different works used for the index.
The list of those works is included in a bibliography in the front, each with an assigned abbreviation for use in the index. The edition that was used is indicated along with the total number of pages. The editor recognizes that you may have a different edition than he used, but he explains you can figure out approximately where it ought to be using the page number of the citation vs. the total number of pages. At least you’ll read some extra GKC in trying to find your quote!
In playing around with it I looked to see if my patron St. John Henry Cardinal Newman might have a mention. Sure enough, there he is with numerous citations across ten different works. Belloc, Hilaire, Chesterton’s bosom friend, commands three quarters of a page to himself. I checked architecture and the good Mr. Sprug has alerted me to half a page of citations on various subtopics from a wide array of GKC’s books. If you’re looking for it, then it’s probably here.
Of course, the limitations of such a work are many. While we might marvel at ninety-two volumes of source material, the reality is that isn’t even the majority of Chesterton’s writing. Chesterton was throughout his adult life a working journalist. And while some of those pieces are collected or became parts of longer monographs, he wrote thousands of columns and reviews over three decades.
It really wouldn’t be until this decade that the full extent of those works has been brought to light through the monumental three-volume bibliography of G.K. Chesterton compiled by Norwegian Geir Hasnes. That set, published in 2022, is available now from the Society of G.K. Chesterton. For the devoted Chestertonian the three-volume bibliography is a treasure trove of information.1
With that said, the Sprug volume has its charm and uses. It is far less intimidating and much more accessible. It’s the sort of thing you can have within arms reach for a quick check to see if a topic caught Chesterton’s attention. It might be all you need for the moment. Sometimes the shallows of an ocean are enough.
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And even that exhaustive resource is somewhat incomplete since one Chesterton essay on detective fiction has only recently been discovered.
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Thanks for this—never realized what a fascinating fellow he was. Have always loved The Man Who Was Thursday. Indelible for me.
After reading "Orthodoxy" I flipped back through the pages and realized I had underlined almost every sentence in the book. I had to say to myself: "why did I even bother!?"
That's Chesterton.