Any scholar or librarian will tell you, once you start to accumulate information, you’re going to need a way to find the bit you need in the inevitable mountain of clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, parchment codexes, and all the other written and digital texts that followed. Human memory is good, but its been centuries since it was possible to read everything. So it’s no surprise to me and other nerds that indexes have been around since at least the beginning of the common era to help us find that one bit in that one book that we read that one time. In Index, A History of the, by Dennis Duncan takes us on a journey through jotted notes, to the first indexes, to mock indexes, to the massive digital databases that run operations like Google.
The first indexes, according to Duncan, did double duty as memory aids and tables of content. Duncan quotes a letter from Pliny the Elder to the emperor at the time, letting him know that he doesn’t have to bother reading Pliny’s encyclopedia; he can just browse the index instead. But it’s a long way from Pliny’s index to where we are now. Duncan takes trips through alphabetical order, how to accurately indicate locations when people keep making the books different sizes, and how detailed the index should be so that it’s not as big as the original book. So much about the index seems intuitive, because we’ve always had them, but some of the oldest extant indexes we have include instructions about how to read and use an index.
One recurring theme in Index is the surprising amount of vitriol people have expressed about how indexes make things too easy! Just like the recurring arguments about how writing is worse than memorization (Socrates in the Phaedrus) or how whatever that other person is doing isn’t real reading, there have been a surprising number of people who think that using the index is cheating. They fret that students will read the indexes instead of the book. Duncan quotes a lot of witty men sneering at “index-learners.” (It was a sick burn for the 1600s.) From my perspective in the twenty-first century, I would respond to these learned men that indexes are a necessary key to finding anything these days. The libraries we have now would blow their bewigged minds.
Over the weekend, I had to work very hard every time I talked to a family member or a friend to not read parts of this book to them. I was fascinated and highly entertained by every chapter of index-y goodness served up by Duncan. I realize that this book is for academic nerds, and not everyone is going to enjoy it the way I did. But you guys, this book is engrossing! And full of index jokes! Which are totally a thing!