The Whatchamacallit at the Back of the Book!

 Duncan, Dennis.  Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the

          Digital Age.  New York: W. W. Norton, 2022.

Books, specifically non-fiction books,  are composed of many parts.  There is the cover, the table of contents, maybe a forward or introduction, the main body of the text, the notes or references, maybe additional sources and then, finally, the index.  The last item, the Index is what Dennis Duncan is specifically interested in.  

 

An index plays a critical part in the book when properly done by letting the reader easily find a name, an event, or a piece of information quickly without having to reread the whole book.  Dennis Duncan opens his history with a J. G. Ballard short story entitled "The Index" which supposedly is the only remaining part of an autobiography.  It tells a story using keywords, subheadings, and page numbers to let the reader piece together the tale.This opening leads into the importance of alphabetization of the index.  Duncan then jumps to the origin of the index which came about with the rise of universities and mendicant orders of preachers and their desire to access their material easily.  And the index came in two flavors - concordance versus subject/word versus concept.  But to be truly useful, the index needs page numbers and there is a nicely done chapter on how that relationship developed.  The growth of indexing created an argument among scholars regarding what is more important - the text or the map of the text, i.e. the index.  People came to blows over this.  Not to mention that you need to be very careful who you let index your book since political disputes, not to mention scholarly  arguments have been carried out in the indexes of various volumes (Swift and Macaulay are among the luminaries mentioned in this chapter).  Then there is the crazy case of fiction with indexes which leads into a discussion on indexes for periodicals.  Print indexes lead to search engines which can act as a universal index except that not everything is digitized yet.  Also, what do you do when the electric is out?  You can always pull up your printed book and indulge yourself. 

If you are interested in the format and composition of books rather than just the contents of books, read Index, A History of the and enjoy the adventure!