book: Index, A History of the

[redbird]

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?!"

Comments

[anne]

Oh good! I have it on hold.

and there's a whole chapter about alphabetical order? HURRAY

[green_knight]

I know there is a lot to say about alphabetical order. I have run into it in a book written in English, with bibliography titles in Swedish and German. Where do titles with 'Ö' go? There's three different locations, all correct.

I think I need to read this book.

[redbird]

I knew about that sort of question -- like whether to treat "ch" and "ll" as letters when alphabetizing Spanish, and Anglophones' tendency to treat ñ and n as the same letter. But I hadn't realized that someone had to invent the idea of alphabetical order, let alone that the idea of putting things in alphabetical order had been controversial.

[readerjane]

That sounds interesting; thanks for the rec.

[sabotabby]

If nothing else, that is one of the best book titles I have ever heard.

I would absolutely add an index to the moral lessons in my novels if I thought even a single person would be interested.

[otter]

Next time I have room in the queue for a white male author, that sounds like a good use of my reading time.

[bibliofile]

I have it out from the library, but other books are due sooner. Glad to hear that it's pretty good (and not just not terrible).

[coth]

Thank you. I have recommended it to the library.

[thistleingrey]

Pretty civilized, really, for the epub at one library system where I have a card:

Your holds position: #24 on 13 copies

[redbird]

I'd thought it would make a real difference to have this particular book as a hardcover book rather than an ebook; having read it, yes it makes a difference, but not a huge one.

I'm also curious about how well the book's real, human-created index works in that format. Duncan talks about the ways indexes do, and don't, work in ebooks. part of the problem is that most publishers aren't doing the work that would be needed to make an index work well when the author, indexer, and publisher don't know what electronic page, containing a changing number of words and images, an index entry should point to. This is doable, it's a solved problem, and I've worked on books whose indexes were laid out that way, but many publishers of ebooks don't bother.

[thistleingrey]

That's very good to know--thank you! I admit to requesting the epub partly to see how things are handled. :)

Agreed, IME it's a solved problem. Though the ways I've done it aren't necessarily practical for most trade books or the occasional fictional text (similar tooling for footnotes/endnotes), handling it in ways trade publishers could sustain is really not that bad. Grump.