PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... erudite, eminently readable and wittily titled ... Fittingly, the book comes equipped with not one but two official indexes — one stellar, the other unabashedly less so — as well as a third and perhaps even a fourth ... In a book as elegantly devoted to literacy as Duncan’s, it would be pleasant if the grammatical infelicities that lightly pepper the text had been buffed away. This is — or should have been — the lookout of the copy editor, a crucial cog in the machinery that mediates between publisher and reader ... It might have made for a richer volume, too, if Duncan had included a treatment of index-making as a fundamentally cognitive enterprise — an idea he flirts with in discussions of indexing taxonomy but does not fully explore ... As for the index — or indexes — to Index, the primary one, by Paula Clarke Bain, is as rigorous as a nonfiction book’s should be, and as enchanting as the index to a book about indexes had better be. Teeming with gleeful, self-referential Easter eggs worthy of Borges or Lewis Carroll, it should be savored in full as dessert — or, if you are willing to be branded ignorant or dishonest, an aperitif ... There is, I think, a fourth index in play, and it, too, is covert. I confess that I discovered it in a flash of irritation, as I began to note dozens of examples of the kind of authorial harrumphing that quickly courts self-parody ... And yet ... Spun together, these declarations form an Ariadne’s thread through the Knossian labyrinth — a steganographic index all its own. (Steganography see writing: hidden.) As erected by Duncan, this set of thoughtful rhetorical signposts ushers the reader smoothly, even soothingly, along a fascinating, immensely pleasurable journey through previously uncharted terrain.
