Indexical

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said to Alice, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

Poor advice for constructing an index, since you need not begin at the beginning of the book, and when you come to the end, you cannot stop. In fact, you’re just beginning. It takes many tours through the typeset pages, scanning for different sights, before an index comes together. Lewis Carroll knew as much, having indexed both his family’s home journal, the Rectory Magazine, and his final, forsaken novel, Sylvia and Bruno, for comic effect.

When it comes to writing a book about the index, though, the King of Hearts may well be right. Dennis Duncan’s delightful Index, a History of the begins with the slow advance of alphabetical order against the mood of the Middle Ages, for which the arbitrary alphabet was “the antithesis of reason.” It ends with hashtags and online searches, neither of which can replicate the subject index, a creative artifact more akin to a Fodor’s guide than to Google…