Index, A History of the
A Bookish Adventure
Dennis Duncan Allen Lane 2021 Hb, 352pp, £20, ISBN 9780241374238
One of the most important labour-saving devices ever thought of, the index, is itself dependent on two earlier advances: alphabetical order and page numbers. A monk’s history of 1386 advises its reader to “note the leaf numbers in the top right corners; these represent the number of each written leaf”. An English dictionary of 1604 begins with an explanation of what the alphabet is, and how it can be used to locate entries in the book.
In the Middle Ages, alphabetisation was considered anti-rational and irreligious.
God had created a Universe in which all things interrelated in a scheme which was perfect, particular and deliberate. To replace this with the arbitrariness of A-Z was to abandon the very essence of scholarship, the quest to discern God’s purposes.
Along with everything else which provides humans with pleasure or convenience, indexes have at times been considered Bad For You. As 21st-century harrumphers worry “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” so their ancestors declared that indexing marked the end of true learning, by allowing the lazy to read only the index instead of the book, “as if a Traveller should go about to describe a Palace, when he had seen nothing but the Privy”.
(Incidentally, the author convincingly argues for “indexes” rather than “indices”, but if only we had followed the Greek rather than the Latin we might be calling them “sillyboi”. Other historic names for an index include pye and margarita.)
Duncan also introduces us to DIY indexes (where the reader fills in the page numbers), pictorial indexes for “him also that cannot Reade”, fiction written in the form of indexes, attempts at a Universal Index of Knowledge, and perhaps strangest of all, battle indexes, when 18th-century Whigs and Tories published mocking indexes to each other’s books. A proper index is indeed
subjective and interpretive.
“Reader indexes” are where the owner of an unindexed book has compiled his own table; one from the 17th century consists of just six entries: Filthy talk; Fornication; Wrath; Murther; Swearing; Cursing.
As a sometime indexer myself, I must note my satisfaction at the perfect inevitability of Duncan’s main title, and a slight irritation at its marring by the redundant and meaningless sub-title.
This peerless book will give immense pleasure to anyone interested in words and the history of their use. For forteans it carries an extra fascination, in reminding us that ideas and systems of ideas – even those which seem the most fundamental – are never universal, spontaneous or everlasting. At some point all ideas are new, all ideas are radical, and all ideas are dangerous. Mat Coward
★★★★★