Letter: Ruth Levitt obituary

Ruth Levitt, with Gillian Northcott, indexed the Macmillan Dictionary of Art

I worked with Ruth Levitt as publisher of the Macmillan Dictionary of Art, a 32-volume scholarly reference work. Over a decade, Ruth and her colleague Gillian Northcott indexed 31 volumes, some 16m words of text and many thousands of images. Their index formed the 32nd volume of the dictionary. Their work was recognised with the Wheatley Medal of the Society of Indexers in 1996, and by the American Society of Indexers’ Excellence in Indexing award in 1997. Ruth had an exceptional ability to marshal enormous quantities of scholarly material into a consistent overview of the history of art worldwide.