BOOK REVIEW: INDEX, A HISTORY OF THE

INDEX, A HISTORY OF THE
A Bookish Adventure From Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age
By Dennis Duncan

Over the last quarter-century, the book as physical organism has been increasingly anatomized, and there has been no better medium for displaying anatomists' findings than the book itself. As they illuminate long-overlooked corners of bibliography, volumes like Anthony Grafton's The Footnote and H. J. Jackson's Marginalia have charted the contrapuntal dance among writer, publisher, reader and material object.

Consider, for example, the 2019 anthology Book Parts, edited by Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth. Its table of contents includes, satisfyingly, Tables of Contents, along with Dust Jackets, Frontispieces and Indexes — a chapter by Duncan himself. Now, Duncan, a lecturer in English at University College London, has expanded that chapter into the erudite, eminently readable and wittily titled Index, A History of the. Fittingly, the book comes equipped with not one but two official indexes — one stellar, the other unabashedly less so — as well as a third and perhaps even a fourth. (More on Indexes: Duncan's multiplicity of, below.)

An index, Duncan explains, is simply a map: a set of signposts pointing to — indicating — where to find what in the text's vast terrain. This map has three constituent parts: rubrics (generally subjects or personal names); locaters (typically page numbers, at least before the e-reader era); and an internal ordering principle (usually alphabetical).

From its inception, the index has provided a window onto the history of the book, for it took the advent of a particular type of book — the codex, a sheaf of pages fastened along one edge — to make an index a practical possibility. The progenitor of the modern bound book, the codex gradually supplanted the scroll, a medium inimical to the indexer's art. (An index in which every entry runs along the lines of Socrates, death of: Take down 11th scroll from set of 12, unroll 37 inches and run a clean finger — perchance an index finger — 21 lines down the right-hand edge will in short order outbulk the text itself.)

The document that today's readers would recognize as an index arose simultaneously in Oxford and Paris in the 13th century, a consequence of the voluminous reading practiced in two newly formed institutions: the universities and the mendicant orders of Franciscan and Dominican friars. With so much reading, Duncan says, came the corresponding need for the contents of books to be divisible, discrete, extractable units of knowledge.

In the mid-15th century, the mass production born of Gutenberg's press began to make the index a regular feature of the bound book. But its very ubiquity — and very utility — would make it an intellectual flash point. As the index becomes more prevalent, Duncan writes, so too does the chance that readers will use it first. Rather than an aide-mémoire the index might be used as the way into a book.

That, by some scholars' lights, was a sacrilege. The 16th-century Swiss bibliographer Conrad Gessner, a meticulous indexer of his own work, admonished:

(Gessner's anxiety, Duncan points out, prefigures by half a millennium modern fears that the seduction of instant Google searches is polluting readers' faculties for immersive engagement.)

In the end, convenience trumped peril, and the index endured. By the Victorian era, compilers had realized that indexes could be far more than mere finding aids — in particular, as Duncan deliciously shows, they made splendid vehicles for settling scores.

To read the complete article, see:
Look It Up? Only if You're Dishonest and Ignorant (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/books/review/index-a-history-of-the-dennis-duncan.html)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web