Index, A History of the by Dennis Duncan

Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age
By Dennis Duncan
WW Norton, 2022

Dennis Duncan is correct, in his new book Index, a History of the, when he points out that the more unassuming and ubiquitous a thing is, the more likely it might be to escape serious historical study. “The humble back-of-the-book,” he writes, zeroing in on his chosen subject, “is one of those inventions that are so successful, so integrated into our daily practices, that they can often become invisible.” 

This is entirely true, and it can lead to noticeable blind spots in popular narrative histories. And thanks to Duncan, one of those lacunae has now been lovingly filled in; having fallen in with the likes of the Society of Indexers, he’s written the most passionate, engaging, and unabashedly nerdy narrative of the humble index that it’s every likely to get. 

He traces the history of the endeavor itself, from ancient stone tablets to the indefatigable Pliny the Elder to our own age of Google and Ctrl+F. He discusses the operational differences between an index and a concordance, writes in fascinating detail about just what it means (and what it doesn’t mean) for books to have numbered pages, and naturally brings his story down to the present day, when the kind of scrupulous, highly individualized indexes he’s not only documenting but celebrating, the kind that “anticipates how a book will be read, how it will be used, and quietly, expertly provides a map for those purposes.” 

The simplest and most widespread emblem of that present day is of course the hashtag, which turns every Internet user into an indexer and inevitably bends to the unruly and invigorating Wiki-nature of the Internet itself. “The hashtag is a truly demotic form, governed by conventions that are unpredictable, ironic, carnivalesque,” Duncan writes. “In the form of the tagger, our patient, bookish indexer has acquired a younger sibling, one who is capricious, sarcastic and fluent in the ever-shifting inflections of the new media.” 

Duncan’s book is brightly energetic and unfailingly interesting, from its main meat to its many eager digressions. Writers and researchers of all stripes rely on the index of every book they consult, but even they may not have known how many twists and turns the history of the index took before it reached its current form. And the index of Index, A History of the? It’s very good.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.