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 Dennis Duncan

INDEX, A HISTORY OF THE

A Bookish Adventure
 Contents

List of Figures
Introduction
1 Point of Order
On Alphabetical Arrangement
2 The Births of the Index
Preaching and Teaching
3 Where Would We Be Without It?
The Miracle of the Page Number
4 The Map or the Territory
The Index on Trial
5 ‘Let No Damned Tory Index My History’
Sparring in the Back Pages
6 Indexing Fictions
Naming was Always a Difficult Art
7 A Key to All Knowledge
The Universal Index
8 Ludmilla and Lotaria
The Index in the Age of Search
Coda
Archives of Reading
Notes
Acknowledgements
Appendix: A Computer-generated Index
Index
 About the Author

Dennis Duncan is a writer, translator, lecturer in English at

University College London, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical
Society. He has published numerous academic books, including Book
Parts and The Oulipo and Modern Thought, as well as translations of
Michel Foucault, Boris Vian, and Alfred Jarry. His writing has
appeared in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and the
London Review of Books, and recent articles have considered
Mallarmé and jugs, James Joyce and pornography, and the history of
Times New Roman.
For Mia and Molly
 List of Figures

1. The catalogue to the Independents’ Show, New York, April 1917.

(Courtesy of the Frick Art Reference Library)
2. Tablet, fourteenth century BCE, showing the Ugaritic alphabet.
(robertharding/Alamy Stock Photo)
3. Papyrus fragment, second century CE. (By permission of the
British Library/Bridgeman Images)
4. Statuette of Euripides, second century CE. (Louvre, Paris,
France/Bridgeman Images)
5. The opening pages of the index to John Hart’s Orthographie.
(The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Douce H 92, ff.
R4v-S1r)
6. Prefatory paragraph to the index to John Hart’s Orthographie.
(The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Douce H 92, f. R4r)
7. Robert Grosseteste preaching to a crowd, from a thirteenth-
century copy of his Chasteau d’amour. (Image courtesy of
Lambeth Palace Library. MS 522, f. 1r)
8. Hugh of St Cher at his writing desk in a fresco at the convent of
San Nicolò. (Alamy)
9. Capitula to a commentary on Mark’s Gospel, late twelfth century.
(By permission of the British Library/Bridgeman Images. Royal
MS 4 B V, f. 2r)
10. Detail from Peter the Chanter’s Distinctiones Abel. (The Bodleian
Libraries, University of Oxford. MS. Bodl. 820, f. 1r)
11. The opening of Robert Grosseteste’s Tabula distinctionum.
(Bibliothèque municipale, Lyon. MS 414, f. 17r)
12. Detail from Robert Grosseteste’s Tabula distinctionum.
(Bibliothèque municipale, Lyon. MS 414, f. 19v)
13. Robert Grosseteste’s copy of De Civitate Dei. (The Bodleian
Libraries, University of Oxford. MS. Bodl. 198, f. 31v)
14. Page number in Werner Rolevinck’s Sermo de presentacione
beatissime virginis Marie, 1470. (The Bodleian Libraries,
University of Oxford. Inc. e. G3.1470.1, f. 1r)
15. A medieval ‘broken link’. (By permission of the Master and
Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge. MS A.12, f. 219r)
16. The book list for Peter Schöffer’s press, Mainz, c. 1470. (Munich,
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek)
17. (a–c). The folding of signatures for a book.
18. Norman Mailer’s copy of William F. Buckley’s The Unmaking of a
Mayor. (Photograph by Stephen Mielke. Image courtesy of the
Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. With
permission from Christopher Buckley)
19. The first page of the multimedia table to Peter Frarin’s Oration.
(The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Wood 800 (3) p.
10)
20. The publisher’s non-apology for the lack of an index in James
Howell’s Proedria Basilike. (The Bodleian Libraries, University of
Oxford. AA 109 Art. p. 219)
21. Title page of Boyle against Bentley. (Author’s collection)
22. Charles Boyle (1674–1731) and Richard Bentley (1662–1742).
(World History Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)
23. William King’s ‘A Short Account of Dr Bentley, By Way of Index’.
(Author’s collection)
24. William Bromley (1663–1732) and Joseph Addison (1672–1719).
(ART Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)
25. Laurence Echard (c. 1670–1730). (Copyright © National Portrait
Gallery, London)
26. Index to the Dodgson family’s handwritten Rectory Magazine.
(Image courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of
Texas at Austin)
27. Henry Morley’s ‘Index to Tears’ in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of
Feeling. (Author’s collection)
28. The index to the index to Clarissa. (By permission of the British
Library/Bridgeman Images)
29. The title page to Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language.
(Album/Alamy Stock Photo)
30. John Fenton’s insignia for the Index Society. (Author’s collection)
31. Cincinnati Public Library, 1870–1953. (Photo by Cincinnati
Museum Center/Getty Images)
32. Detail from a draft sheet for the St Jacques Concordance.
(Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 105, f. 1r)
33. First page of the Concordance to the Poetical Words of John
Dryden. (By permission of the British Library/Bridgeman Images)
34. An advertisement for the MACREX program in The Indexer.
(Reproduced by permission of the licensor through PLSclear and
the British Library/Bridgeman Images)
35. Alejandro Cesarco’s Index. (Photograph by Gill Partington)
36. A blind impression for compiling an index. (Photography by the
author, from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
H1938)
37. An aborted list of highlights in Thomas Young’s Englands Bane,
or the Description of Drunkennesse. (Photograph by the author,
from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 26117)
38. ‘Index of Envelopes by Page Shape’. (Copyright © 2013 by Jen
Bervin. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing
Corp.)
 Introduction

‘I for my part venerate the inventor of Indexes … that

unknown labourer in literature who first laid open the nerves
and arteries of a book.’
Isaac D’Israeli, Literary Miscellanies

It is hard to imagine working with books – writing an essay, a

lecture, a report, a sermon – without the ability to find what you’re
looking for, quickly and easily: without, that is, the convenience of a
good index. This convenience, of course, is not confined to people
who write for a living. It spills over into other disciplines, into
everyday life, and some of the earliest indexes appear in legal
statutes, medical texts, recipe books. The humble back-of-book
index is one of those inventions that are so successful, so integrated
into our daily practices, that they can often become invisible. But,
like any piece of technology, the index has its history, one that, for
nearly 800 years, was intimately entwined with a particular form of
the book – the codex: the sheaf of pages, folded and bound
together at the spine. Now, however, it has entered the digital era as
the key technology underpinning our online reading. The very first
webpage, after all, was a subject index.1 As for the search engine,
the port of embarkation for so much of our internet navigation,
Google engineer Matt Cutts explains that ‘The first thing to
understand is that when you do a Google search, you aren’t actually
searching the web. You’re searching Google’s index of the web.’2
Today, the index organizes our lives, and this book will chart its
curious path from the monasteries and universities of Europe in the
thirteenth century to the glass-and-steel HQs of Silicon Valley in the
twenty-first.
 A history of the index is really a story about time and knowledge
and the relationship between the two. It’s the story of our
accelerating need to access information at speed, and of a parallel
need for the contents of books to be divisible, discrete, extractable
units of knowledge. This is information science, and the index is a
fundamental element of that discipline’s architecture. But the
evolution of the index also offers us a history of reading in
microcosm. It is bound up with the rise of the universities and the
arrival of printing, with Enlightenment philology and punchcard
computing, the emergence of the page number and of the hashtag.
It is more than simply a data structure. Even today, faced with the
incursions of Artificial Intelligence, the book index remains primarily
the work of flesh-and-blood indexers, professionals whose job is to
mediate between author and audience. The product of human
labour, indexes have produced human consequences, saving heretics
from the stake and keeping politicians from high office. They have
also, naturally, attracted people with a special interest in books, and
our roster of literary indexers will include Lewis Carroll, Virginia
Woolf, Alexander Pope and Vladimir Nabokov. The compiling of
indexes has not, historically, been either the most glamorous or the
most lucrative of professions. We might think of Thomas Macaulay’s
lament that Samuel Johnson, the most eminent writer of his age,
nevertheless spent his days surrounded by ‘starving pamphleteers
and indexmakers’.3 Had he but known it, Johnson might at least
have consoled himself with the thought that in this company of
indexers he would be surrounded by the most eminent writers of
other ages too, and that, though undersung, the technology they
were tinkering with would be central to the reading experience at
the dawn of the next millennium.

What do we mean by an index? At its most general, it is a system

adopted as a timesaver, telling us where to look for things. The
name suggests a spatial relationship, a map of sorts: something here
will point you to – will indicate – something there. The map need not
exist in the world; it is enough for it to exist in our minds. Writing in
the middle of the last century, Robert Collison proposed that,
whenever we organize the world around us so that we know where
to find things, we are in fact indexing. He offers a pair of illustrations
that could hardly be more 1950s if they came wearing brothel
creepers:

When a housewife makes a separate place for everything in

the kitchen she is in fact creating a living index, for not only
she, but all her household, will gradually get used to the
system she has created and be able to discover things for
themselves … A man will get into the habit of always putting
change in one pocket, keys in another, cigarette-case in a
third – an elementary indexing habit which stands him in
good stead when he checks up in his hurry to the station to
see whether he has remembered his season-ticket.4

A mental index: that’s how women find the sugar and men find their
cigarette-cases. In fact, glibness aside, Collison makes an important
point here. The mapping of the kitchen works not just for the
housewife but for ‘all her household’: it exists in multiple minds.
What if someone were to write it down: ‘flour: top cupboard on the
right; spoons: drawer by the fridge’, and so on? Then we would have
a system that could be used instantly, on the fly, even by someone
who was unfamiliar with the kitchen. Now we are getting closer to
something more like what we, surely, think of as an index,
something that doesn’t exist solely in the mind; a kind of list or table
telling us where things are. We expect some abbreviation,
presumably. A map that’s as big as the territory is an absurdity; so
too with an index. A library catalogue – library catalogues, as we will
see in Chapter 1, have played a major role in information science –
will boil books down to their salient details: title, author, genre. In
the same way, a back-of-book index will distil its source work into a
collection of keywords: names, places, concepts. Abstraction, then:
reducing the material, summarizing it, to create something new and
separate. The index is not a copy of the thing itself.
What else? As Collison says, most of us can carry around the
layout of a kitchen in our heads. If you had to write it down, how
long would your kitchen inventory be? Not, perhaps, unmanageable.
But what about a longer inventory? All the objects in your house? All
the books in a library? When the list approaches a certain length it
becomes unwieldy: it becomes no more convenient to search
through the list than to search the shelves themselves. What we
need is arrangement. The index needs to be ordered in a way that
its users will recognize, that makes it easy to navigate. This is where
the index and the table of contents diverge.
Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, rather unhelpfully, defines index as
‘the table of contents to a book’, and on the face of it the two have
much in common. Both are lists of labels with locators, i.e. page
numbers (but, as we’ll see, the page number too has its own history,
and other types of locator – Bible chapters, for instance – predate
it). Both point to places in, or sections of, the main text, and in the
late Middle Ages the two even go by the same array of names –
register, table, rubric – making them indistinguishable without closer
inspection. When Chaucer’s Knight briskly refuses to speculate on
what happens to one of the characters in his tale after their death –
‘I nam no divynistre: / “Of soules” find I nought in this registre’ (in
other words, ‘I have no special insight: my register has no entry for
“Souls”’) – it is hard to know precisely which type of list he has in
mind. Nevertheless, the two are quite distinct book parts – bookends
straddling the main text, one before, one after – each with its own
function and history.
Even without locators, the table of contents provides an overview
of a work’s structure: it follows the ordering of the text, revealing its
architecture. We can glance at a table and reasonably conjecture
what the overall argument is. To a degree, therefore, a table of
contents is platform independent. It offers broad-brush navigation
even in a work that exists as a series of scrolls – and indeed it has a
history that stretches back into antiquity, before the arrival of the
codex. We know of at least four Latin writers, and one Greek, from
the classical period who attached a table of contents to their
works.5 Here, for example, is Pliny the Elder, the great Roman
naturalist, dedicating his magnum opus the Natural History to the
Emperor Titus:

As it was my duty in the public interest to have consideration

for claims upon your time, I have appended to this letter a
table of contents of the several books, and have taken very
careful precautions to prevent your having to read them. You
by these means will secure for others that they will not need
to read right through them either, but only look for the
particular point that each of them wants, and will know where
to find it.6

Or, to paraphrase, ‘Because you’re so busy and important, I know

you won’t be able to read the whole thing. Therefore, I’ve attached
a handy table so you can browse what’s on offer and pick the
chapters that interest you.’
A lengthy work like the Natural History would be spread over
many scrolls, maybe even dozens. Locating a portion of the work
would be a matter first of finding the right one, then laying it on the
table and unfurling it carefully to the desired section. Not an
unimaginably tedious process, as long as one does end up at the
desired section. The chapter, after all, is a large enough division of
text to make the effort worthwhile. But let us for a moment allow
ourselves an anachronistic fantasy: let us imagine that, along with
the table of contents, Pliny also supplies a new device with his work,
an innovation beamed in from another age a thousand years hence,
an instrument that Pliny, without knowing quite why, decides to call
an ‘index’. And let us imagine that Titus, late one night, is moved to
see what the Natural History has to say about one of his
predecessors on the throne, the Emperor Nero, murderer of Titus’
childhood best friend. (In modern webspeak we have a name for
this type of late-night reading: doomscrolling.) By candlelight our
imperial reader unrolls Pliny’s index. The Natural History makes six
references to Nero: three in Book VIII, one in Book X, a couple more
in Book XI. Titus notes them all down and, after locating the scroll
containing Book VIII, spends an age finding the first mention, a
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