Appealingly titled ... I had never thought of the index as much more than a tool ... Duncan says, we usually turn to an index as a 'convenience' and 'timesaver.' It’s like a map ... If all of this sounds obvious and unobjectionable, Duncan’s smart, playful book will encourage you to think again. The straightforward utility of the index turns out to be what made it such a disruptive innovation in the first place ... Duncan writes...with an admirable clarity that also hints at the enormousness of his subject ... Duncan gives a surprisingly vivid explanation of how the two foundations of the contemporary index — alphabetical order and pagination — themselves had to be invented ... That Duncan brings...old, intricate disputes to life is a testament to his gifts as a writer — imaginative but also disciplined, elucidating dense, scholarly concepts with a light touch ... Index, A History of the is furnished not with one index but two ... The second was compiled by Paula Clarke Bain, a professional indexer. I don’t want to give anything away (words I never thought I’d use about an index), other than to say that its relationship to Duncan’s text is not just as a guide but also as a companion. Duncan has written such a generous book, attentive to the varieties of the reading experience, that it’s only fitting he gave Bain’s index some space to flourish, a chance to come into its own.
The cleverly punctuated title of Dennis Duncan’s book, Index, A History of the, should signal that this isn’t a dry account of a small cogwheel in the publishing machine. Instead, it is an engaging tale of the long search for the quickest way to find what you need in those big, information-rich things called books. It is indeed an adventure, and 'bookish' in the most appealing sense ... Duncan goes into fascinating detail about all this — page numbers get an entire chapter of their own — with digressions into curious byways of booklore and literature ... From ancient Egypt to Silicon Valley, Duncan is an ideal tour guide: witty, engaging, knowledgeable and a fount of diverting anecdotes. The book skews toward the literary, but anyone interested in the 2,200-year journey to quickly find what one needs in a book will be enlightened, and will never again take an index for granted. The well-designed book also includes nearly 40 illustrations. As might be expected, the index — created not by the author but by Paula Clarke Bain — is magnificent.
... 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.
... lively ... I was reminded, reading Duncan’s paean to them, just how whimsical indexes can be ... In giving the index its biography, Duncan rightly celebrates the paratexts—the peripheral ephemera—that transmogrify an author’s work from a Microsoft Word doc into a pleasing object on the shelf of your local bookshop ... If those topics don’t get your heart racing, perhaps this isn’t the book for you—but that would be a shame. Duncan’s enthusiasms are contagious, such as his effusion over the 'characterful' gothic capital J—actually meant to stand for 1—the first printed page number, in the margins of a 15th-century printed sermon: 'I love this J all the more for its blurriness. I would rather it were this way.'
Witty and wide-ranging ... Index, A History of the is subtitled A Bookish Adventure. It is certainly bookish ... But he is adventurous as well, often writing as if academic research were as revved-up as a Formula One race ... As this scholarly rapture discloses, Duncan inherits his sense of vocation from the studious priests who compiled the earliest indexes: for the true devotee of literature, every book is potentially holy.
Although I’ve used indexes to file content from books I’ve used in research, the index at the end of Dennis Duncan’s book shows they can be savoured as literary creations ... While Duncan certainly puts the human back into the story of the index, the book also tells the story of a tension within the drive to index ... Index, a History of the is deeply researched yet delightfully readable and helps the reader appreciate an often-neglected literary form, at a time when algorithmic searches seem to be radically transforming it. Yet, while Duncan’s book is expansive in time, it is narrow in space. He doesn’t discuss the index outside the 'western' world ... I would have loved to know how to index a book in a non-alphabetic writing system ... Despite these limitations, Duncan has done serious readers and writers a profound service by dragging the index into the sunlight as something with a past and (hopefully) a future. I, for one, will not be taking the index for granted any more, nor the anonymous labours of those who craft them.
... entertaining and erudite ... The distinction between the more interpretive subject index and the more objective word index remains important throughout Duncan’s book. There’s more fun to be had with the subject index, naturally, and his wide-ranging narrative seeks it out ... Bringing the point to life, in an inspired move, Duncan includes two indexes to Index, A History of: one computer-generated and one by Paula Clarke Bain, a 'professional indexer and a human being.' The computer-generated index is boring and occasionally nonsensical. Bain’s, on the other hand, is helpful and includes some of her own witty surprises. In an unexpectedly high-spirited book on indexes, the fun continues to the very last page.
... a learned and playful study ... Duncan describes well the devious deployment of indexes and indexing in works by Lewis Carroll, Woolf, Nabokov, Calvino—et al. At times, his interest in the literary history of the form distracts from the fascinations of its actual practice and principles. Problems of logic, hierarchy, and style emerge quite late in the book, and some obvious questions—whence and why passim?—remain unanswered. But total knowledge, so this book teaches, is a fantasy.
Fascinating ... Duncan maintains there is no substitute for the specialist indexer able to pick up themes, connotations and nuances that even the best software, rigidly tethered to keywords and tags, is unable to discern.
[A] gracefully learned, often witty and enlightening, but sometimes trying book ... A phenomenon I believe most writers have experienced and which I call 'prophylactic prolixity' [is a] reaction to the fear one might not have quite enough material to complete the book—article, book review, whatever—and the resulting tendency to overwrite until it’s clear the required length can be reached. Ideally, you then go back and trim ... As Index, A History of the helps us understand—Google is where two threads of index history cross ... It seems unfair that books rarely name the skilled and judicious professionals who compile their indexes. It will surprise no one that Mr. Duncan gives credit where credit is due, and that Paula Clarke Bain’s index for Index, besides being a model of the form, is full of jokes, Easter eggs, sadistic wild goose chases (or 'circular cross-references'), and Hitchcockian cameos
... the most passionate, engaging, and unabashedly nerdy narrative of the humble index that it’s every likely to get ... 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.
The index, as Dennis Duncan shows in Index, A History of the, has been around for a long time ... Lucid, lively ... Duncan wheels out (to use his term) the passage from Plato’s Phaedrus in which Socrates argues that writing makes humans inattentive and forgetful. He could have said a little more about the ambiguities of that dialogue and the ambivalences of its author.
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 ... 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 ... The range of his knowledge is clear ... Duncan is to be commended for a meticulously researched book, as evidenced by the end notes ... The book is at its most engaging when Duncan weaves in examples from literature and politics ... Index, A History Of is full of...thoughtful observations, somewhat weighed down in a very detailed text.
[A] puckish eulogy to this often overlooked appendage ... If indexes are so useful, why don’t novels have them? With his eagerness to scurry down each and every rabbit hole, a tendency that makes this book a trove of bookish anecdote, Duncan unearths examples of novelists using them as fictive playthings ... And what of this wittily engaging, wide-ranging book’s own index? Duncan playfully offers two, the first generated by computer. Surprisingly entertaining, it chops the book into small chunks and regurgitates it almost at book length. Duncan pulls the plug at the entry for ‘amusement, mere’ and hands it over to a human indexer, Paula Clarke Bain, who shows how the job ought to be done, with some amusing running gags thrown in for good measure.
A good indexer must have a clear sense of the terrain, the imagined user, and what they need to find their way. To illustrate this point, Duncan includes two indexes in his own book, one by a professional indexer and the other by a software programme. The computerized version is a headache-inducing jumble ... In contrast, the index by Paula Clarke Bain is a joy, full of selfreferential gags ... Duncan proves an amiable companion on what his subtitle aptly refers to as a 'bookish adventure'. We join him in the archive ... He does well to squeeze meaning out of his source materials, alert to subtle shifts of tone in these apparently functional bits of text. Whistle-stop introductions to the printing press and the construction of early books make this work useful as an introduction to book history in general as well as indexes in particular.
... a miracle: a fast-paced, informative, and humorous book on, of all things, the index. A few passages could be trimmed...But he does what few humans could: write a book on this subject that is actually fun to read ... a tribute to deep, careful, and meticulous reading, because the true heroes of Index, a History of the are actually deep, careful, and meticulous readers.
Readers — even those who think the subject of this witty book could be filed under 'Books, dullest parts of' — will be delighted by Duncan's breezy survey of the kinds and uses of indexes.
This entertaining book is rich with gems ... Duncan does not come across as a systematic thinker, and I don’t think I would ever ask him to prepare an index. His book is full of digressions – into alphabets, paper, page numbers, footnotes, dictionaries, reading, editing, collation, cartography, symbology – some of them necessary, some less so ... Nor is the book a comprehensive, sequential history of indexes. Duncan pays less attention than I expected, for example, to proto-index tables in illuminated manuscripts from the early Middle Ages. Nor is there much on index-like guides from non-European texts. Duncan has nothing to say at all about Henry Ashbee’s eroto-index masterpiece ... Duncan’s book is less a definitive history of indexes than a series of thematic essays – on imaginary indexes, indexes as puzzles, indexing as a vocation, indexes as revenge and much else besides. Though Duncan is not an index person, he shares with index people what turns out to be their chief anxiety: whether indexing is worthy labour and a worthy interest ... Readers wanting a history of the index might have expected something more linear, more ordered, more comprehensive, more … index-like. Fortunately, however, the criteria that define a good index are not the same as those that define an excellent book about indexes ... A book on systems authored by a non-systematic writer? Somehow it works. Duncan is not just an index-raker or second-hand critic, and his contribution is not mere Alphabetical Learning. An exemplar of contemporary scholarship, Index, a History of the will change how people think about indexes, and may well change how people think about books.
... the genesis of this critical yet often invisible element of the book is revealed with impish insight and erudition ... meticulously researched ... A delightful ensemble of history, technology, literary lore, and information science, Index, A History of the is a joy for bibliophiles the world over.
Duncan is very good on the historical development of the index ... it's the many small details in this artfully created index that really shine ... very good on history, and also in considering the index in our age of search (engines) and digitization, but not quite as comprehensive as one might wish. Most notably, it is very English-centric ... a most enjoyable read about a fascinating and perhaps underappreciated subject. As a longtime appreciator -- indeed venerator -- of indexes, I need no convincing, but for readers who perhaps haven't concerned themselves too much with them it is certainly also an eye-opener -- and a lot of good fun.
Clever, sprightly ... Duncan is a brilliantly illuminating and wide-ranging guide across this richly varied terrain, though his cast of characters remains overwhelmingly male.
This book’s playful title announces both its subject and its tone ... This may sound like dry stuff, but the narrative both sparkles with geeky wit...and shines with an infectious enthusiasm ... 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.
Duncan...mixes humor and scholarship to brilliant effect in this accessible deep dive into the history of indexes ... Duncan makes a persuasive argument that it is natural for reading methods and text technology to evolve in order to make information easier to find. Readers of this enlightening and entertaining survey won’t take the humble index for granted again.
