Index, A History of the  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age is a 2022 book by Dennis Duncan that examines the history of indexes. Indexes, argues Duncan—paraphrasing Jonathan Swift's Mechanical Operation of the Spirit.

In his A Tale of a Tub, Swift proposed that there "are the men who pretend to understand a book by scouting through the index, as if a traveller should go about to describe palace when he had seen nothing but the privy".

Background

In books, indexes are usually placed near the end (this is commonly known as "BoB" or back-of-book indexing). They complement the table of contents by enabling access to information by specific subject, whereas contents listings enable access through broad divisions of the text arranged in the order they occur. It has been remarked that, while "[a]t first glance the driest part of the book, on closer inspection the index may provide both interest and amusement from time to time."

Indexes, origins of

The indexes origins, says Duncan, maybe found in the Library of Alexandria, where in the 3rd century curators attached tags to scrolls to record their position and briefly itemise their contents; "not an index, but a start", suggests Duncan. In Europe, he argues, the index proper as we know it began with the bible with roots in the medieval universities and monasteries. This stemmed from the growing necessity of medieval preachers to organise their work coherently, particularly with making quotations and scripture easier to find. The 13th-century religious philosopher Robert Grosseteste wrote a Table of Distinctions, which Duncan calls Grosseteste's own Google on parchment. Instead of arranging his entries at the rear of the book, or arranged alphabetically, he used a series of [[symbols and icons to mark certain paragraphs and segments of texts. This list—of around 440 items—enabled quick and easy access to the many sources he relied on in the course of his speaking career, whether as preacher or statesman. Grosseteste, as a polymath, says Duncan, needed something to bring "cosmos out of chaos. An encyclopedic mind needs an encyclopedic index to provide it with structure."

At first it was feared that merely mechanical indexes such as these would make books themselves redundant, as there would be no need to consult the original work. Duncan argues that it is not a coincidence that it is the norm to use the same finger—the middle—to scroll down an index as it is to jab the air as if emphasising a point, both aspects of the medieval religious debate. He demonstrates various forms of immediate usage the index lent itself too:

Disputation, the citing of authorities, the reading-out of commentaries (a format with a now familiar name: the lecture): scholastic learning would favour external demonstration over inner revelation, intellectual agility over endless meditation.

Indeed, the Papacy's own catalogue of books deemed unchristian was the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The modern index, Duncan argues, required two essential components to be themselves invented before there could be an index: alphabetisation and pagination. The latter came about when numbered pages became the norm for printed works, along with a cultural shift from writing on scrolls to codices. Duncan argues that, when monks, for example, re-wrote existing works—as was the norm before the invention of printing—they effectively rendered any previous index useless, as their pagination was almost certainly to be different. It was also seen as intrusive; numbers became as important as words, and the numbers themselves reflected the physical form of the book rather than its intellectual contents. Duncan described his feelings viewing a particular manuscript from 1470, of

Disbelief that something so significant, something of such conceptual magnitude, should be here on my deskTemplate:Nbsp... It feels astonishing that I should be allowed to pick it up, hold it, turn its pagesTemplate:Nbsp... I feel like I am on the verge of tears.

The reason, he explained, for his emotion was the fact that the manuscript had a small number one printed on the first page. This was the first printed page number in history, which Duncan describes as "miraculous".

Alphabetisation was seen as "an irrational method of categorization". It required a cultural shift in the practice of the creator, and the mind of a reader, who had to consciously start spelling consistently. Middle English was generally spelled as it was heard, being based on pronunciation, and as such there was no firm or readily accepted absolute spelling. Hence its continued rarity throughout the Middle Ages, when it was actively disdained as "the antithesis of reason" as, being a list, it did not stimulate original thought.

Indexes, argument over

The invention of printing, though, led not only to the proliferation of indexers, but the proliferation of disparaging and pejorative terms with which they and their trade were called, such as "index-raker", possessing only "index learning". Indicating the degree to which early indexes were seen as counterintuitive, or not user friendly, many contained an initial paragraph of explanation as to its use and benefit. Ralph Jones, writing in the New Humanist describes his surprise to find that "by the 18th century the index wasTemplate:Nbsp... subject divisive enough to invite disdain and incite literary bickering", and accusations of encouraging skim-reading. Duncan, however, emphasises the degree to which an indexer was a practitioner of manual labour, if a painstaking form of it. Conversely, their commitment was also always to a higher plain, an intellectual exercise requiring neutrality for the sake of the reader, who demands repeated and concerted decision-making on their behalf. In Time, Cady Lang suggests that the "often overlooked" index may have saved lives in the course of its existence. Duncan ascribes a degree of the index's initially poor reputation as being down to the fact that that it "kill[ed] off experimental curiosity" in the 17th century and has been looked down on since. It was not abnormal, he says, for readers to enter a book from the back and so prejudge whether to carry on. Szalai also questions whether a reader "of an intimidatingly big book decide only to skim the simulacrum—the bite-size summary offered by the index—instead of immersing themselves in the real thing?"; likewise, Douglas asks, whether—and especially regarding fiction—"with an index, will readers pick out only the good bits?" Steven Moore—"a literary critic who moonlights an indexer"—attests to the arguments that continue to this day as to the extent and detail an index should be expected to go before it removes the necessity of reading the work itself.

Moore comments how "I had one client who wished every noun in his book could be indexed, and I’ve often had to point out to authors that an index is not a concordance (which lists every word in a book in alphabetical order)".

Indexes, digital

Writing in The Guardian, Peter Conrad argues that modern search engines and other methods of instant online searching has "slashed our attention span and made memory redundant". Despite the increasing sophistication of E-readers and search functionality, Duncan disputes that a search engine can replace the ability of a human to browse, synthesise and interpret what it intellectually ingests. This, he suggests, is because the software is tied to tags and categories, with rigid boundaries and strict demarcations; humans are not. Duncan subscribes to the view that, in the same way as to how those in the Middle Ages feared for the future of books in the face of indexing, indexes today face a similar foe. He reminds his readers that Google itself is little more than an index for the biggest library in the world. Duncan argues that indexes represent a symbiotic relationship between any given point in man's history and the breadth of his knowledge at that point; as Szalai puts it, "the morass of the digital world is indexed and served up to us by search engines". Duncan argues that, while digital search may well encourage laziness, "It is good for the nerves, I think, to have some historical perspective"; he also argues that, in today's context, "anxieties about information technology are as old as writing itself". However, argues Duncan, human input will still be required in at least an oversighting role, tidying up after the software.

Examples, notable

• Martin Amis's memoir, Experience contains in its index references under, for example, "Dental problems", to items such as "— of animals", "—Bellow on" and "— dentifrice purchase".

• Duncan includes fictive indexes, for example that comprising the whole—and telling the whole story of—J. G. Ballard's story 'The Index', or Nabokov's 1962 Pale Fire, in which a deranged editor creates an index to disparage an author's literary output.