The Pleasures That Lurk in the Back of the Book

It’s hard to believe, but the humble index—expediter of searches, organizer of concepts— prompted outcries as it became more widespread: If one has an index, why would anyone read a book? Alarms “were being sounded,” Dennis Duncan writes in his lively Index, A History of the, “that indexes were taking the place of books.” Jonathan Swift worried that people would “pretend to understand a Book, by scouting thro’ the Index, as if a Traveller should go about to describe a Palace, when he has seen nothing but the Privy.”

I confess to spending an undue amount of time in the Palace Privy—and loving it. Done well, an index, that list in the back of a book containing its concepts and references, is either hugely helpful, sending you directly to the mentions of, say, Theodore Roosevelt’s dog Pete attacking the French ambassador, when you don’t want to