Look It Up? Provided that You’re Dishonest and Ignorant.

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

During the last quarter-century, the e book as bodily organism has been more and more anatomized, and there was no higher medium for displaying anatomists’ findings than the e 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 amongst author, writer, reader and materials object.

Contemplate, for instance, the 2019 anthology “E book Components,” edited by Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth. Its desk of contents consists of, satisfyingly, “Tables of Contents,” together with “Mud Jackets,” “Frontispieces” and “Indexes” — a chapter by Duncan himself. Now, Duncan, a lecturer in English at College School London, has expanded that chapter into the erudite, eminently readable and wittily titled “Index, A Historical past of the.” Fittingly, the e book comes geared up with not one however two official indexes — one stellar, the opposite unabashedly much less so — in addition to a 3rd and maybe even a fourth. (Extra on Indexes: Duncan’s multiplicity of, under.)

An index, Duncan explains, is just a map: a set of signposts pointing to — indicating — the place to seek out what within the textual content’s huge terrain. This map has three constituent components: rubrics (typically topics or private names); locaters (usually web page numbers, no less than earlier than the e-reader period); and an inner ordering precept (often alphabetical).

From its inception, the index has offered a window onto the historical past of the e book, for it took the arrival of a selected kind of e book — the codex, a sheaf of pages fixed alongside one edge — to make an index a sensible risk. The progenitor of the trendy sure e book, the codex step by step supplanted the scroll, a medium inimical to the indexer’s artwork. (An index wherein each entry runs alongside the strains of “Socrates, loss of life of: Take down eleventh scroll from set of 12, unroll 37 inches and run a clear finger — perchance an index finger — 21 strains down the right-hand edge” will in brief order outbulk the textual content itself.)

The doc that at present’s readers would acknowledge as an index arose concurrently in Oxford and Paris within the thirteenth century, a consequence of the voluminous studying practiced in two newly fashioned establishments: the colleges and the mendicant orders of Franciscan and Dominican friars. With a lot studying, Duncan says, got here the corresponding want “for the contents of books to be divisible, discrete, extractable items of information.”

Within the mid-Fifteenth century, the mass manufacturing born of Gutenberg’s press started to make the index a daily function of the sure e book. However its very ubiquity — and really utility — would make it an mental flash level. “Because the index turns into extra prevalent,” Duncan writes, “so too does the possibility that readers will use it first. Moderately than an aide-mémoire the index may be used as the way in which right into a e book.”

That, by some students’ lights, was a sacrilege. The Sixteenth-century Swiss bibliographer Conrad Gessner, a meticulous indexer of his personal work, admonished:

“Due to the carelessness of some who rely solely on the indexes … the standard of these books is under no circumstances being impaired … as a result of they’ve been misused by ignorant or dishonest males.” (Gessner’s anxiousness, Duncan factors out, prefigures by half a millennium fashionable fears that the seduction of immediate Google searches is polluting readers’ schools for immersive engagement.)

Ultimately, comfort trumped peril, and the index endured. By the Victorian period, compilers had realized that indexes might be excess of mere discovering aids — particularly, as Duncan deliciously exhibits, they made splendid autos for settling scores.

Edward Augustus Freeman is greatest remembered at present for 2 issues: his ardent views on Aryan racial supremacy and being the father-in-law of the English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, excavator of the Palace of Minos at Knossos. In keeping with his fellow historian John Horace Spherical, nevertheless — or, extra exactly, to an immense entry within the index of Spherical’s 1895 e book “Feudal England” — he also needs to be remembered thus:

“Freeman, Professor: … his ‘details’ … his pedantry … misconstrues his Latin … his confused views … his particular weak point … his wild dream … distorts feudalism. …” The entry concludes with a convincing slap of a subhead: “necessity of criticizing his work.”

A small slap of my very own: In a e book as elegantly dedicated to literacy as Duncan’s, it might be nice if the grammatical infelicities that flippantly pepper the textual content (“no such character offered themselves,” “which anybody of their proper thoughts would wish to keep away from”) had been buffed away. That is — or ought to have been — the lookout of the copy editor, a vital cog within the equipment that mediates between writer and reader.

It may need made for a richer quantity, too, if Duncan had included a remedy of index-making as a basically cognitive enterprise — an thought he flirts with in discussions of indexing taxonomy however doesn’t absolutely discover. The method of indexing — entailing sample recognition, hierarchical ordering selections and a eager really feel for semantics — has a lot to inform us about what the linguist George Lakoff has referred to as “a central purpose of cognitive science.” (This objection, nevertheless, could also be not more than a manifestation of “Criticism: reviewers’ pipe goals triggered by private biases of.”)

As for the index — or indexes — to “Index,” the first one, by Paula Clarke Bain, is as rigorous as a nonfiction e book’s needs to be, and as enchanting because the index to a e book about indexes had higher be. Teeming with gleeful, self-referential Easter eggs worthy of Borges or Lewis Carroll, it needs to be savored in full as dessert — or, in case you are prepared to be branded ignorant or dishonest, an aperitif. To wit:

“Round cross-references see cross-references: round,” “cross-references: round see round cross-references,” …“indexers: human superiority; veneration of [and quite right too]” and the unimpeachably informative “X, no entries starting with.”

Should you retain the slightest doubt about “indexers: human superiority,” then please flip to the e book’s illustrative secondary index — leaden, lumbering and generated by a industrial software program program. In an act of editorial mercy, Duncan has reproduced it solely partway via the A’s.

A 3rd index lies hiding in plain sight between the strains of Bain’s: a de facto index to her personal index. As demonically pleasant because the bigger map to which it serves as a information, it lures readers via her textual content by way of a rating of entries that work like a mad Carrollian snark hunt:

“Bootless errand see idiot’s errand,” “idiot’s errand see fruitless endeavor,” “fruitless endeavor see hopeless quest,” “hopeless quest see misplaced trigger,” “misplaced trigger see merry dance,” and merrily onward.

There may be, I believe, a fourth index in play, and it, too, is covert. I confess that I found it in a flash of irritation, as I started to notice dozens of examples of the form of authorial harrumphing (“and so we come, ultimately,” “allow us to pause to contemplate”) that shortly courts self-parody.

And but … Spun collectively, these declarations kind an Ariadne’s thread via the Knossian labyrinth — a steganographic index all its personal. (Steganography see writing: hidden.) As erected by Duncan, this set of considerate rhetorical signposts ushers the reader easily, even soothingly, alongside a captivating, immensely pleasurable journey via beforehand uncharted terrain.