Index, A History Of The

Dennis Duncan Allen Lane £20

Few readers of books ever give much thought to the index and who might have compiled it. It’s a place to dip into, to get your bearings and to remind yourself where you’re going and where you’ve been. Yet the index has its own fascinating history. And Dennis Duncan is just the man to write it. Duncan likes indexes so much he admits to being brought close to tears of rapture upon examining for himself a priceless early example (‘the most intense experience that I have had of the archival sublime’ he waxes). In Roman times, the word index referred merely to a label displaying author and title affixed to the edge of a scroll so that someone could tell what it was without having to unroll the blessed thing (the same sort of label was known to the ancient Greeks as a ‘sillybos’ – giving us the word ‘syllabus’).

Yet by the 19th Century the index had not only become an essential component of books and periodicals, but had also acquired its own potency (a mock index written in a satirical work about Richard Bentley, the King’s librarian, by a hated rival itemises thus; ‘Bentley; His egregious dulness p.74, His Pedantry from p. 93 to 99, and His familiar acquaintance with Books that he never saw, p 76.’) By 1877 such was the craze for the humble index that a society was formed to promulgate its objectives (though ironically the society’s first publication lacked an index).

From the Roman Empire to the age of the search engine and hashtag, Duncan’s enthusiasm for his subject leavens what could be a subject as dusty as the shelves of any reference library; yet this remains a serious book for serious bibliophiles.

As for the multitude of anonymous compilers who toil away at this neglected literary form, Duncan hopes his own work may serve ‘as a wreath laid at the tomb of these unknown readers’.

Michael Simkins