Dennis Duncan

As the subtitle promises, this was a “bookish adventure,” probably of interest mostly to those who are curious about the history of publishing or information science, or books as objects, or who are indexers themselves. In my past life as a publishing freelancer, I dabbled in indexing, and I found this book interesting and entertaining.

I’d never given much thought to how back-of-the-book indexes came to exist, so a lot of the early history was fascinating to me. How much thought have show more you ever given to the utility and arbitrariness of alphabetical order? Or the origin of page numbers? There were also examples of interesting indexes through history, including visual indexes, satirical indexes, and indexes as literature (which motivated me to add Nabakov’s Pale Fire to my reading list).

The index of this book itself is full of easter eggs, inside jokes, and wit. For example, in the text there’s a section about using an index as a satire of the work being indexed: “[A] witty indexer can draw attention to the ludicrousness or inconsistencies in an otherwise innocuous-looking text.” Duncan gives an example of such an index that has entries such as “That Men can’t swallow when they’re dead,” “Dr Lister bit by a Porposs, and how his Finger fell sick thereupon,” “The Head that was a Bag.” The indexer, Paula Clarke Bain (the only indexer I know who has been credited in the book indexed), has made an entry to this page “hoggs that sh-te soap, 152.” Funny, and a brilliant illustration of the concept! As other examples, here are two subheadings under “indexers”:

indexers, life in the old indexer yet, 11
indexers, veneration of [and quite right too], 1

For more indexing humor, among many others, look up “cross-references,” “nuns dance din,” “drudgery, of indexing,” “msiprints” [sic], the subheading for Kinbote, Charles, and of course the final entry.

It is, however, a tragedy that the acknowledgments near the end of the book clearly took up more pages than Bain allowed for in the proof she was indexing, so all the page locators after that are incorrect. What a shame that the publisher didn’t think to correct them, thereby introducing errors into this tour de force of indexing! (On the other hand, who would have expected there to be any entries for the back matter, which, after all, consists of just the indexes?) show less

I confess: I picked this book out on title alone. It's clever. And I love books about books and their history - I have a small collection of and about dictionaries, for example - but this topic was a little new for me. And you may be excused for thinking that a book about that end of the book, helpful to browse through when you're looking to research a topic or see where, say, Churchill is mentioned would be dry and dull unless you were an academic or someone who otherwise had a very show more specific interest in the topic.

If that's your impression, you'd be wrong about this book. Duncan takes the history of the index and not only covers the basics - such as early concordances, adding Bible chapter and verses, page numbers - but also makes the personalities of some of the people who argued about (and through!) indexes come alive. This is witty, humorous, and accessible. I grant you it may still be for a very select audience of book lovers, but if you're at all on the fence about it, I urge you to try it and see if you don't come away with an appreciation into what went into creating this particular way we organize information. If you have any doubt on where I came down on it, I'll just say... I even read the index. show less

Fascinating! I hadn't ever thought about the fact that it's a separate step from "alphabet" and even "alphabet in specific order" to "sort things alphabetically" - it's just the way things are, now. Tracing the history of how the idea developed, and the structures that grew from that, was fascinating. Duncan is a very good writer, too - looping in texts and people and attitudes of the time, from early medieval to recent past. The index as a concept and a structure is older than that, but show more it's in early medieval times that there's enough written history and surviving texts to really discuss the matter. Fascinating bits, like the source of the words we use (indices were originally little glued-on tabs that let you tell what was in a scroll without unrolling it, for instance). The arguments about the uses of an index, the tricks and insults created through using it, some fascinating poetry and novels and translations... The distinction between a subject index and a concordance, and how that was worked out by various people down the centuries. Early computer indexing, and how that has developed - more for concordance than for subject indexes; the latter need a deeper understanding of the text than computers can manage (yet, anyway). I learned a lot and enjoyed myself. One downer note, right at the end - throughout the book (ebook), there are linked endnotes. Tap the number in the text and it shows you the note from elsewhere in the book. But at the end he presents, with great fanfare, a subject index created by a skilled human indexer. But the numbers are just numbers, no links. They're page numbers for a particular physical edition; if I wanted to go back and read them in the ebook, I'd have to search for each term in the subject index. Awkward, slow, error-prone - it's a very poor example of the utility of a good subject index. So that was a disappointment, at the very end of this large and very interesting book. And apparently my disappointment made me miss some Easter eggs...maybe I'll go back and look at that index. I'll be looking for more by this author. show less

The index is considered from all angles in this book, certainly I never thought of opposition from those people who thought having indexes meant not having to read the book. The Whig historian Macaulay was afraid that a Tory would index his history in an effort to change its politics. Indexing a novel seems to me in the same realm as highlighting a novel. Even word by word as opposed to letter by letter alphabetization is discussed as a way to change the true content of the book. So, it is show more not enough to say that the index was invented, but why and to what end was it invented, used and abused. The history of the index, then, is as complicated as the history of anything else. show less