What do you think about book indices? Do you think about book indices? If you’re like most people, the first question doesn’t make much sense and the answer to the second is something like “Hardly ever.” The book index is so ubiquitous that we hardly notice it even if we occasionally use one.
It wasn’t always that way. Once upon a time, the notion of a book index was so controversial that people wrote diatribes against them, and like the New Luddites of today, predicted that people would stop reading books altogether preferring to just scan the index to see what the book was about.
Having prepared the index for two books, I can tell you that making it is one of the hardest parts of getting a book ready for publication. No one likes doing it but if you’re writing a non-fiction book, you pretty much have to. You would think that you could just mark a word as an index item as you write the manuscript and you can but no one does, probably because it forces your mind away from the content.
Over at Prospect Magazine, Michael Delgado has an interesting article on the history of the index and the controversies surrounding it. The article is sort of a review of Dennis Duncan’s new book, Index, A History of the. I haven’t read the book but the title alone makes it enticing.
Most of us probably don’t have sufficient interest in things like book indices to read a whole book about them but Delgado’s article is interesting and short enough to make it a worthwhile read.