New York Times Book Reviews the Adventures of Flash Jackson
Nonfiction
Look It Up? Only if You're Quack and Ignorant
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INDEX, A HISTORY OF THE
A Bookish Adventure From Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age
By Dennis Duncan
Over the last quarter-century, the book as concrete organism has been increasingly anatomized, and there has been no better medium for displaying anatomists' findings than the book itself. As they illuminate long-overlooked corners of bibliography, volumes similar Anthony Grafton's "The Footnote" and H. J. Jackson's "Marginalia" have charted the contrapuntal trip the light fantastic among writer, publisher, reader and material object.
Consider, for case, the 2019 album "Book Parts," edited by Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth. Its table of contents includes, satisfyingly, "Tables of Contents," along with "Dust Jackets," "Frontispieces" and "Indexes" — a chapter by Duncan himself. Now, Duncan, a lecturer in English at University College London, has expanded that chapter into the brainy, eminently readable and wittily titled "Index, A History of the." Fittingly, the book comes equipped with not 1 but ii official indexes — one stellar, the other unabashedly less and so — likewise as a 3rd and perhaps even a 4th. (More than on Indexes: Duncan's multiplicity of, beneath.)
An index, Duncan explains, is simply a map: a set up of signposts pointing to — indicating — where to find what in the text's vast terrain. This map has three constituent parts: rubrics (mostly subjects or personal names); locaters (typically page numbers, at least before the e-reader era); and an internal ordering principle (usually alphabetical).
From its inception, the alphabetize has provided a window onto the history of the volume, for it took the advent of a particular type of book — the codex, a sheaf of pages fastened along one edge — to make an alphabetize a applied possibility. The progenitor of the modern jump book, the codex gradually supplanted the scroll, a medium inimical to the indexer's fine art. (An index in which every entry runs forth the lines of "Socrates, expiry of: Accept down 11th scroll from set of 12, unroll 37 inches and run a clean finger — mayhap an index finger — 21 lines down the right-hand edge" volition in short order outbulk the text itself.)
Prototype
The document that today's readers would recognize as an index arose simultaneously in Oxford and Paris in the 13th century, a consequence of the voluminous reading adept in 2 newly formed institutions: the universities and the mendicant orders of Franciscan and Dominican friars. With and so much reading, Duncan says, came the corresponding need "for the contents of books to exist divisible, detached, extractable units of knowledge."
In the mid-15th century, the mass product born of Gutenberg's press began to make the index a regular feature of the bound book. But its very ubiquity — and very utility — would go far an intellectual flash signal. "Every bit the index becomes more than prevalent," Duncan writes, "so too does the chance that readers volition use it first. Rather than an aide-mémoire the index might be used as the way into a book."
That, by some scholars' lights, was a sacrilege. The 16th-century Swiss bibliographer Conrad Gessner, a meticulous indexer of his own work, admonished:
"Because of the abandon of some who rely simply on the indexes … the quality of those books is in no way being impaired … because they have been misused by ignorant or dishonest men." (Gessner's anxiety, Duncan points out, prefigures by one-half a millennium modern fears that the seduction of instant Google searches is polluting readers' faculties for immersive engagement.)
In the end, convenience trumped peril, and the alphabetize endured. By the Victorian era, compilers had realized that indexes could be far more than than mere finding aids — in particular, equally Duncan deliciously shows, they fabricated splendid vehicles for settling scores.
Edward Augustus Freeman is best remembered today for two things: his ardent views on Aryan racial supremacy and existence the father-in-police of the English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, excavator of the Palace of Minos at Knossos. Co-ordinate to his fellow historian John Horace Circular, however — or, more precisely, to an immense entry in the index of Round'southward 1895 book "Feudal England" — he should also be remembered thus:
"Freeman, Professor: … his 'facts' … his pedantry … misconstrues his Latin … his confused views … his special weakness … his wild dream … distorts feudalism. …" The entry concludes with a resounding slap of a subhead: "necessity of criticizing his work."
A small slap of my own: In a book as elegantly devoted to literacy equally Duncan'south, it would be pleasant if the grammatical infelicities that lightly pepper the text ("no such character presented themselves," "which anyone in their correct mind would want to avoid") had been buffed away. This is — or should have been — the lookout of the re-create editor, a crucial cog in the mechanism that mediates between publisher and reader.
It might take made for a richer volume, too, if Duncan had included a handling of index-making as a fundamentally cognitive enterprise — an idea he flirts with in discussions of indexing taxonomy merely does not fully explore. The process of indexing — entailing pattern recognition, hierarchical ordering decisions and a keen feel for semantics — has much to tell u.s.a. nigh what the linguist George Lakoff has called "a central goal of cerebral science." (This objection, notwithstanding, may be no more than a manifestation of "Criticism: reviewers' piping dreams triggered by personal biases of.")
As for the index — or indexes — to "Index," the main one, by Paula Clarke Bain, is as rigorous as a nonfiction book'due south should be, and as enchanting as the alphabetize to a book most indexes had better be. Teeming with gleeful, self-referential Easter eggs worthy of Borges or Lewis Carroll, it should exist savored in full as dessert — or, if you lot are willing to be branded ignorant or dishonest, an aperitif. To wit:
"Circular cantankerous-references see cross-references: circular," "cross-references: round see circular cantankerous-references," ..."indexers: human being superiority; veneration of [and quite right too]" and the unimpeachably informative "Ten, no entries beginning with."
If y'all retain the slightest dubiousness about "indexers: human being superiority," then please plough to the book's illustrative secondary index — leaden, lumbering and generated past a commercial software plan. In an act of editorial mercy, Duncan has reproduced it just partway through the A'southward.
A third alphabetize lies hiding in manifestly sight between the lines of Bain's: a de facto index to her ain alphabetize. As demonically delightful as the larger map to which it serves as a guide, information technology lures readers through her text via a score of entries that work like a mad Carrollian snark hunt:
"Bootless errand see fool'southward errand," "fool's errand see fruitless attempt," "fruitless endeavor see hopeless quest," "hopeless quest see lost cause," "lost cause come across merry dance," and merrily onward.
In that location is, I remember, a fourth alphabetize 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 ("and so we come, at last," "let u.s.a. interruption to consider") 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: subconscious.) As erected past Duncan, this set of thoughtful rhetorical signposts ushers the reader smoothly, even soothingly, along a fascinating, immensely pleasurable journey through previously uncharted terrain.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/books/review/index-a-history-of-the-dennis-duncan.html
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