author : Dennis Duncan

Most of us take the alphabetical index in the back of non-fiction books for granted. But they haven’t always existed. This lovely book gives a fascinating history, including many pre-requisites before indexes are possible. For example, before a publication can have an index, there needs to be: alphabetical order (so it’s possible to find something in the index itself); the book form itself, of separate leaves, to make it easy to find the place being indexed, rather than scrolling through acres of text; and even the humble page number, for the index to point to. All these things also had to be invented.

Duncan leads us through the history of the invention and evolution of the index, its use as a political weapon, why it doesn’t work for fiction, but can work as an art form itself, and more. I particularly like the fact that the index was originally met with moral panic: indices would stop people reading books, they would instead lazily just dip in and pick up snippets. Of course, as Duncan points out, Socrates bemoaned the very act of reading, as people wouldn’t bother to learn any more.

The book has copious endnotes and two indexes (Duncan explains why that is the correct plural in this case). The first (partial) index is computer generated, in order to demonstrate that it is not very good; the second, proper one, is professionally generated, and much superior. Despite all the great material included, the book is lacking my favourite quotation about indexes: “the man who published a book without an index ought to be damned ten miles beyond Hell, where the Devil could not get for stinging nettles”. But that’s a minor issue about a topic that I never realised was so fascinating.