Index, A History of The

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. If you’re reading a book with an index, you probably take that index for granted. But it turns out that indexes and their history are far more interesting than you might think. And their story is told in a delightfully nerdy new book by Dennis Duncan. It’s called, appropriately enough, Index, a History of the. And it turns out that the history of the index is really about the history of writing and the history of books themselves. Even in antiquity, Plato worried that the new technology of the time, that is writing and reading, was going to make people stupid because they’d stop memorizing things and they’d be dependent on the written word. And even in the Middle Ages, as scribes started using indexes, these new contrivances were not entirely welcome, surprisingly enough.

Indexes provoked similar concerns. People worried, well, if a book has an index, why would anybody actually read a book? And in the early 18th century, Jonathan Swift worried that people would pretend to understand a book, quote, by scouting through the index, as if a traveler should go about to describe a palace when he has seen nothing but the privy.

And it’s also a hearty appreciation of professional indexers. In fact, the author gives a shout out specifically to Paula Clark Bain, who is the professional who wrote an index to this book. And she shows how authorial and even playful a good indexer can be. He also includes a computer-generated index. And it’s just not as good. It’s just not as interesting. Is not as alive as the one that Paula Clark Bain produced.

I looked at that computer index and I agree. It was fine. I could use it, but it was lifeless. It didn’t have the extra knowledge, the pragmatics that a human would bring to the job, understanding that A was a part of B and that you should include it as a sub-index item. Computerized stuff just isn’t quite there yet for that.

The other thing I was thinking as I browsed this book and I didn’t read it, nor did I do what is called a Washington read. Do you remember what that term is? It’s when you take a book, you look for your name in the index. If you don’t find it, you put it back. Right, right.

There’s a famous story about William F. Buckley sending a copy of his latest book to Norman Mailer. And in the index where Norman Mailer’s name is listed, Buckley wrote, hi. Well, that book again is called Index, A History of Thee, and it’s by Dennis Duncan. I’m looking forward to finishing the book.

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