Index, A History of by Dennis Duncan

a good index is and what indexes are grossly inadequate and I loved learning more about the history of the index. The author states that “A history of the index is really a story about time and knowledge and the relationship between the two.” Indexes took millennia to achieve their current overlooked and undervalued state. The book looks back to the Library of Alexandria in the third century B.C. To identify the hundreds of thousands of rolled-up scrolls, Egyptian librarians attached tags that not only identified the author and title but also itemized the contents. Not an index, but a start. It was the Bible that birthed the index. Of course. If you had to guess, you should have guessed the Bible. In the Middle Ages, preachers and theologians needed a quick way to locate certain passages, so, beginning in the 13th century, monks met that need by constructing prototypes of the index, organized either by phrases, keywords or themes. They were keyed to chapter and verse, and by the end of the century, page numbers came into use. Those locaters would allow non-Biblical books to be indexed, especially after the printing press was invented. The evolution of what an index should be, could be, and has become is a fun read, not dry at all, and the book takes us up to the modern day, where computers both simplify and complicate the job. I did not know that there are professional indexers, and now I want to pursue that in my later career.