Index, A Bookish Review of the

 

...the index presents a perfectly sized nook for the deployment of discreet snark.

Index, A History of the
By Dennis Duncan

I finished reading Index, A History of the last night and it was delightful. I always find bookish history interesting but this one added some friendly intrigue to the tales, with some added doses of snark from history. History does have some funny tales to be told. 

I am not sure that indexes are used as much today except by scholars, or thought about in much depth (being that there was no history of the index, Dennis Duncan had to fill that gap and write this book), but it does actually influence us every single day because chances are you Google something most everyday, and what you access when you type in your inquiry into the Google search bar is Google's index. Fascinating that the tech giant of all information out there in the web world uses a system invented in the 1230s. I love that. I love learning how ancient and/or medieval systems or tools are still being used today. That the physical book and its included search engines (the indexes - and yes the plural is indexes, not indices. Indices are for mathematics, and indexes are found at the back of books. You can blame Shakespeare for this usage if you want to argue.) are relevant and still used now, perhaps in varying capacities, but still using the original invention.

The index, I learned, was a place where occasionally in history an editor would insert some objection or snarky comment about the contents of the book, by writing entries for subjects with an added personal commentary attached (such as adding an Index to Tears into a poorly written highly sentimental short novel, whereby listing all the 50-60 times a character would suddenly burst into tears). 

The index works best when created with a human mind, rather than a computer. A subject index is what people would use an index for, such as to look up forgiveness or mercy in relation to finding the story of the Prodigal Son in Scripture. A word for word index (or concordance) that a computer would create would have no connection between the concepts of forgiveness and mercy (words not actually used in the Biblical narrative) and someone would be out of luck in searching for it. But if a human creates a subject index, they would know to include the story of the Prodigal Son under the subjects of forgiveness and mercy in anticipation of someone possibly wanting to look that up where those examples might be.

I loved learning about medieval broken links. As the copied manuscripts ranged in different sized paper and books from their originals, the pagination changed and the index often would point to the wrong page if not updated to correct the references. And how astounding that in this modern day of Kindle and electronic books, we could have a similar issue as the pages can be enlarged/expanded beyond the borders, or fonts could be changed, thereby possibly causing a post modern broken link.

Fiction is usually not indexed (as we all probably know, usually it's non-fiction books that have indexes at the back), except in a few instances - my favourite of which is of course Lewis Carroll. Leave it to him to add whimsy to the humble, mundane index. I can't help but laugh and smile at the logic and fun he provokes in me by creating such index entries as  --

General, Things in, 25

Ideas upon ink, 73

In General, Things, 25

Ink, Ideas upon, 73

Milk, Musings on, 61

Musings on Milk, 61

On Milk Musings, 61

Things in general, 25

There are many more entries in the index, but I just pulled out a few of the favourites. The wit is pure delight. What fun it is to play with words. One huge reason why I love Lewis Carroll so much.

So, get to know your bookish history, friends, and get ready to enjoy every step of that journey.