Index, A History of the: Detailed account of the index through the ages

Index, A History of

Author: Dennis Duncan

ISBN-13: 978-0241374238

Publisher: Allen Lane

Guideline Price: £20

“A history of the index is really a story about time and knowledge and the relationship between the two. It’s the story of our accelerating need to access information at speed, and of a parallel need for the contents of books to be divisible, discrete, extractable units of knowledge.”

This compelling summary of Index, A History Of is given by author Dennis Duncan in an early section of his new book, which itself is neatly broken up into eight extractable units, or chapters, that look to chart the evolution of the index and its significance in literary and intellectual culture.

Starting with the origins of the index in the monasteries and universities of 13th-century Europe and finishing with the evolving index of the present day, which Duncan calls “the age of search”, the book purports to offer “a riveting story of ambition, obsession and alphabetical order” by an author with an “extraordinary sense of wit”. Further markers of a book that promises to be both knowledgeable and diverting include the subtitle “a bookish adventure” and a cover blurb from Lynne Truss, author of the bestselling Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

The packaging of Index, A History Of as humorous and whimsical is misleading. This is not a lightly entertaining book that will appeal to both professionals and amateurs. Instead there is the odd flash of humour and a few bright anecdotes in an otherwise dense narrative that gives a detailed and considered history of the index. Indexes, scholars of will undoubtedly find much to interest them. Reader, the average may not.

Scrolls and manuscripts

Seven of the eight chapters focus on previous centuries, in keeping with the historical tone of the book, yet leaving the reader mired in an age of scrolls and manuscripts for much of the narrative. We are promised interesting arguments on time and knowledge, on the way information has been broken down and consumed by readers and writers over centuries, but Duncan is more interested in detailing (and at times reproducing) indexes from various texts and times throughout history, which can only hold interest for so long.

A translator and lecturer at University College London, Duncan has published academic books, including Book Parts and The Oulipo and Modern Thought, as well as translations of Michel Foucault, Boris Vian and Alfred Jarry. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, and recent articles have considered Mallarmé and jugs, James Joyce and pornography, and the history of Times New Roman.

The range of his knowledge is clear in Index, A History Of. He brings us confidently through different eras, from Roman times, where “an index meant a label, a name tag for a scroll. These are not indexes in our modern sense. Not quite. But we’re getting somewhere: indicating the contents,” to the Middle Ages where the scholar and polymath Robert Grosseteste lights upon a new way of ordering text, or as the author puts it: “An encyclopaedic mind needs an encyclopaedic index to provide it with structure.”

Practices of yore

Duncan is to be commended for a meticulously researched book, as evidenced by the end notes, but also by the pictures of ancient scripts and indexes that he includes along the way, helping the reader to envision the practices of yore. A chapter on the misuse of indexes, or rather the fear of misuse, is an interesting reminder that there is always a cohort in society that fears invention: “What Macaulay is getting at, of course, is the idea that an unscrupulous indexer can radically change the emphasis of a text.”

The book is at its most engaging when Duncan weaves in examples from literature and politics. There’s the American intellectual Norman Mailer and his rival Robert Buckley, who uses the index as insult, or the trouble taken by Nabokov’s widow Vera to replicate the ending of his novel Pale Fire when she translated the book into Russian. Commentary on the metaliterary works of JG Ballard (The Index), Virginia Woolf (Orlando) and Agatha Christie (The ABC Murders) also helps to enliven proceedings.

In the final chapter, Duncan uses Italo Calvino’s postmodern novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller to discuss how we use indexes in current times. In the novel, a character called Lotaria invents a reading machine where “literature can be carved up and shuffled, regurgitated in different orders”. In this age of e-readers, search functions and short attention spans, a case can be made that we are inching ever closer to this reality.

Index, A History Of is full of these thoughtful observations, somewhat weighed down in a very detailed text. Yet it seems almost fitting in this instance. As Duncan himself notes, when discussing Nabokov, “the index is not a form well-suited to narrative. It is hard to break in.”