Book Reviews

Duncan, Dennis. Index, a history of the: A bookish adventure. London: Penguin, 2021. 352 p. ISBN 9780241374245. £20.00.

I used to like making indexes to publications when I started my career long ago in pre-computer era of my life. Not that I can boast being a professional in this area or that someone knows about these indexes even if I myself think that they were quite decent ones. But I definitely can appreciate the possibilities of having ones own way with the indexes when you compose them. That was actually a way to express at least some criticism of the society we lived in. Rather a safe way I should say, because the index will be the last part of the text monitored by omnipresent censors and not so easy to penetrate even when this happened. But it was also a way to highlight the features of the text that one liked, to express the relation to the authors or the subjects they explored. If I had known the possibilities explained by Dennis Duncan, I would have had even more fun than I did. Dennis Duncan is a bibliography scholar and historian who obviously knows the nature of a book intimately.

The fun of reading the book started with spotting the title in the first place. Books published by Penguin are rarely addressed in our review section, but this had such a wonderful title. I am sure that only a really bookish person can appreciate its subtlety conveying so much about the book, its subject and the author himself. It is also a very precise title addressing the core subject of the book. I asked for a copy of the book for review from the publisher, but it has never arrived, most probably due to disrupted communication in pandemic situations. Well, even if the title is witty, the subject is so boring to read about... Let it be... Then the book had received the ALA's award of the best information science book of 2021. And not for nothing.

The amount of research that is put into the study of the subject of indexes is enormous. The author covers it from the beginning of times with the emergence of alphabetic writing, the catalogue in ancient library of Alexandria or the first tables of content and finishing with Google indexing and use of artificial intelligence for making indexes for the books. In between, we get acquainted with many interesting events and initiatives, books and all kinds of tools used for organising and searching their content. Never mind seemingly boring subject, this book is full of adventures, like concordances, page numbering, naming, funny fictional characters, serious preachers and scholars, technologies and tools. The author explains clearly why indexes only have taken root in printed codex books with numbered pages, though there were so many different attempts earlier.

He also populates the book with more of less know human characters that make it so alive and colourful. The mottos to each chapter are taken from sayings of known historical figures and often are quite unexpected. But I especially liked everything that Duncan has written about the people involved in production of various tools so helpful for navigating the text. Some of them are very famous figures, some known less, but all of them are erudite and experts of a book. They come to life on the pages of the book and make serious decisions (if the word indexes was good enough for Shakespeare, it will suite us too), avoid prison sentence by producing an English concordance, hang paintings in alphabetical order of painters' names, kill their fictional characters before they finish the index to a poem, wear spectacles long before these were invented, produce first lists of books for advertising, salute a person on the index page, produce visual indexes of envelope poems, or demand Let no damned Tory index my history!

I surely admit that these are not the most important things in the text, but they make it so delightful and I am sure that some of you reading this review will at least take a look at the book to find out what it is all about. Use the index - it will surely help.

The pages are also populated with various books providing rich material for exploration of the development of book and its elements in general, and indexes in particular. The author has many helpful figures illustrating his examples and they are really to the point in supporting his arguments.

I have already mentioned the index at the end of the book. There are actually two. They are provided as an illustration to the discussion of computer and human produced indexes in chapter 8. One is compiled by a computer and not finished. Another is created by Paula Clarke Bain, a professional indexer and a human being. The last one serves its proper function very well and is obviously a creation of a professional indexer. But it is a very fine example of a work by a clever woman with a subtle sense of humour and strong views. Check by yourself, if you do not believe me.

I usually end reviews by pointing out who may be interested in the book. I would suggest everyone who looks for a very enlightening and delightful reading. Get a printed book. I have tried an e-book as well and can vouch that in this case the format makes a difference, which is not always the case for readers. For a reviewer, working with print volumes is much easier and more rewarding than with digital versions. I predict a strong decline in the numbers of book reviews in the nearest future as the publishers are inclined to send ecopies for reviews. Though this one I would have done for any format.

Elena Maceviciute

Swedish School of Library and Information Science
January, 2022

How to cite this review

Information Research is published four times a year by the University of Borås, Allégatan 1, 501 90 Borås, Sweden.