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Dennis Duncan's Index, A History of the is excellent, and if the title sounds at all appealing I recommend it.
The author goes into useful detail on things that many people barely notice. Chapter 3, "Where Would We Be Without It?" is subtitled "the miracle of the page number," including the move to greater specificity, from "this is in the second printed signature" to "look on the fifteenth physical page" to the page numbers we take for granted, where the front and back of that physical page have separate numbers.
The book is also about the long history of people worrying that readers will read indexes, tables of contents, and other summaries rather than the whole book in the order the author wrote it, and the contrasting approach of Pliny's "My lord, I know you are too busy to read my whole book, here is a summary that I hope will be useful" and Samuel Richardson's lengthy index to the moral lessons of his novel Clarissa.
We end (for now) with search engines, including the limits of the mechanical "indexing" that produces something close to a concordance. We can tell a computer "find everything that includes the word 'elephant,' or 'prodigal,'" and it won't find things would seem obvious to a human indexer, or the person who made the request, like mammoth corpses frozen for thousands of years under "elephant" or the parable of the prodigal son for "prodigal."
This book is for people whose reaction to "Point of Order: on Alphabetical Arrangement" is "I didn't know there was that much to say about alphabetical order" rather than "come on, a whole chapter about alphabetical order?!"
The author goes into useful detail on things that many people barely notice. Chapter 3, "Where Would We Be Without It?" is subtitled "the miracle of the page number," including the move to greater specificity, from "this is in the second printed signature" to "look on the fifteenth physical page" to the page numbers we take for granted, where the front and back of that physical page have separate numbers.
The book is also about the long history of people worrying that readers will read indexes, tables of contents, and other summaries rather than the whole book in the order the author wrote it, and the contrasting approach of Pliny's "My lord, I know you are too busy to read my whole book, here is a summary that I hope will be useful" and Samuel Richardson's lengthy index to the moral lessons of his novel Clarissa.
We end (for now) with search engines, including the limits of the mechanical "indexing" that produces something close to a concordance. We can tell a computer "find everything that includes the word 'elephant,' or 'prodigal,'" and it won't find things would seem obvious to a human indexer, or the person who made the request, like mammoth corpses frozen for thousands of years under "elephant" or the parable of the prodigal son for "prodigal."
This book is for people whose reaction to "Point of Order: on Alphabetical Arrangement" is "I didn't know there was that much to say about alphabetical order" rather than "come on, a whole chapter about alphabetical order?!"
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