Is there any documentation available for the support for named vertices in adjacency_list introduced with version 1.38 and announced in the release notes?

Not that I know of. I've started migrating all of the documentation to quickbook and augmenting it with new and otherwise undocumented features. I'll add documentation for named vertices there. This won't be available for quite some time (1.39/1.40).
 
Andrew Sutton
andrew.n.sutton@gmail.com