INDEX, A HISTORY OF THE

This book’s playful title announces both its subject and its tone.

Duncan, a professor of English, opens by observing that “the humble back-of-book index…is one of those inventions that are so successful…that they can often become invisible.” Then the author makes visible its development and refinement. This may sound like dry stuff, but the narrative both sparkles with geeky wit (the plural form indices is “for mathematicians and economists”) and shines with an infectious enthusiasm, as when the author celebrates the blurry impression of the very first page number. In the early chapters, Duncan discusses the development of the physical book, a survey that includes such delicious moments as the examination of a faithfully copied but useless medieval index to a book whose original had different pagination. He follows a mostly chronological, march-through–Western Civilization organization—any analogous systems used for organizing information in non-Western cultures go unmentioned. Within this structure, Duncan ranges back and forth in history. In the chapter on Renaissance-era scholars’ anxiety that an index would lead readers to skip the book proper, he touches on both Socrates’ skepticism of written language and modern-day hand-wringing at the effects of the internet on reading. A chapter on the emergence of the “weaponized index” treats readers to some epically funny battles in snark. The book’s illustrations are few but well chosen, presenting both the odd marginal symbol Duncan likens to “a snake holding a machine gun” inked by a 13th-century scholar, and the cheeky “Hi!” William F. Buckley wrote next to the index entry for Mailer, Norman in a gifted copy of his memoir. Duncan brings his chronicle into the digital present before closing with not one, but two indexes: a machine-generated one and a human-compiled one, by Paula Clarke Bain, member of the Society of Indexers, whose wit matches the author’s and underscores his passionate appreciation of the art.

Always erudite, frequently funny, and often surprising—a treat for lovers of the book qua book.