I don’t remember learning to read. I was always told that I picked up reading early and easily, and that must be so because I can’t remember not being able to read. I was a voracious reader when I was young, one of those kids repeatedly told to get their nose out of a book and go outside to air the stink off. As an adult I have read on average at least one book a week—plus news in print, magazines, the usual suspects. Words and wordplay have always fascinated me. I am addicted to crosswords and their glorious mutant byblow the cryptic, have even constructed a few. I’ve had two long out of print mass-market paperback novels published, four more are submerged in that sad limbo of Kindle editions, one just went to what might be Rejection City, and over the years I’ve sold somewhere around 50 pieces of SF short fiction, the most recent last fall.
So, I love words. I love books. I am not alone. We are everywhere, and if you are reading this you are probably one of us. You can't help yourself.
I first heard of the book Index, a history of the, subtitled A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age, by Dennis Duncan, when the author was interviewed on Public Radio. This guy is a pro member of the book geek tribe, an Oxford lecturer in English, and he’d written a whole book largely about that odd caboose at the back of some books, the part you ignore unless you find yourself needing to use it: the index. He was funny and engaging, his book sounded intriguing. I just finished reading it.
The history of the index is long, convoluted, filled with controversy and contention—not a surprise since much of the drive toward concordances and indexes came from men who wanted their favorite axes to grind to be easier to find in the Bible and scriptural writings. The author provides examples of the development of books and indexes to make you grin or cringe, looking back to such figures as Socrates, who was dead set against the written word, passing though the scroll, the illuminated codex, the first works coming off the printing press, and up to today’s methods. So many things came together in the birth and development of the modern book: the change from scrolls to sheaves of sheets of skin, and then paper; the printing press. Duncan also gives us the skinny on other, rarely considered innovations. For instance, it took nearly 200 years for alphabetical order to be formally adopted as a means of organizing information.
Or this: one especially lyrical passage concerns Duncan holding in his hand and contemplating a small, worn tome.
I am in the Bodleian Library in Oxford with a small printed book open on the desk in front of me. This is the text of a sermon, and it was printed in Cologne at the printshop of a man named Arnold Therhoernen. The book is no larger than a paperback, and the text itself is short, just twelve leaves—twenty-four pages—long. But sitting here in the library with the book before me and opened to its first page is, I think, the most intense experience that I have had of the archival sublime, the sense of disbelief that something so significant, something of such conceptual magnitude, should be here on my desk among my own workaday effects—laptop, notebook, pencil. It feels astonishing that I should be allowed to pick it up, hold it, turn its pages as though it were a novel I purchased at the train station. Why is it not under glass, sealed off, labeled and exhibited where crowds of schoolchildren might look but not touch?
What has rendered him so awestruck? After a bit about the book’s genesis and author, a monk named Werner Rolevinck, we find out, bolded italics mine:
If the truth be told, however, it is neither Rolevinck nor his preaching that make the book special for me. It is something else, something about the book itself, there on the right-hand margin, halfway down: a single, large capital J. The ink has bled slightly, the impression slightly too strong so that the letter is a little smudgy, without the detail and clarity of the gothic lettering in the main text block. Nevertheless, I love this J all the more for its blurriness. [snip] Our marginal J has nothing to do with the name Joachim. In fact our J is not a J at all. It is there as a numeral -–1—announcing that this is the first leaf of the book. Our J is the first printed page number. It will revolutionize the way we use books. And in doing so it will become such a commonplace that it will almost disappear from view, hiding in plain sight at the edge of every page.
Reading that blew me away. I think of strange stuff all the time—I write SF--but had never stopped to think that there might be such an artifact as the first book with numbered pages, and even if I had I would've been clueless as to how to identify, to say nothing of find it. Yet this simple innovation strapped rockets to the usability—and searchability—of printed texts.
Along the way we learn about satirical indexes, revenge indexes, indexes that were longer than the books they served, literary pie-fights, the attempt to create a steampunk Google Compendium of Everything Index in the early 1900s. We hear the tale of the first index/concordance (of the works of the poet Dryden) created on and by an early IBM mainframe computer, a task that involved converting a quarter of a million hand-done index cards into a mere 240,000 punch cards.
I learned a few new words, always a thrill to a word nerd. My favorite is the name for something I have seen thousands of times, but had never stopped to give due regard. It is this symbol: ¶ The name for it is a pilcrow, a name derived from the Greek and used since Medieval times. I also learned the difference between indexes and indices, a surefire party talk topic. Or so I surmise; I avoid parties like a Medieval plague.
Index is funny, wide-ranging, informal and informative. It is a lovingly bemused look into a history most of us never knew existed, and the cast of peculiar characters who were there when it happened.
It is, of course, indexed. It has two of them, in fact. One machine generated, the other the work of an artist in the trade.