Getting lost for words

Index, A History of the – A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age,

by Denis Duncan (Allen Lane/ Penguin Books, €15.50/ £10.99)

Dennis Duncan, who lectures in English at the University College London, is a man of many parts and a writer of diverse, bookish interests. His most entertaining book, which deals as much with human folly, as with intellectual wisdom, is a rich brew, which those persons who in the past enjoyed Caught in the Web Words about John Murray and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, or HL. Mencken’s vast three volume treatise on The American Language (which everyone concerned with the nature of North American history should know something about) should enjoy. 

But what I find disconcerting is that this serious, yet amusing book, should be published at a critical time for culture. For Duncan, in celebrating the utilities of the index, is writing in a time when the index itself is actually disappearing from many kinds of books. This may seem hard to believe, but is it is true. Look next time you are in a book shop.

When I began publishing books, some five years after leaving college, it was taken for granted by my London publisher that I would do the index. And so I did, equipped with the handbooks I had acquired dealing with the making of books and their parts, and a large pack of index cards. Naturally I bore the cost in the publisher’s eyes, which was mainly in my time, for it was seen as part of my book.

Changes

However, publishers found that with changes in the kinds of people writing books, many of whom would not do indexes, the publishers would have to do them, engaging a professional indexer, and passing the cost on to the author, say about £500 or more.

It seemed to some authors that everyone engaged in publishing was making fees out their books except those who wrote them. Of course, a professional index maker does an excellent job and is worth the money in terms of cost and efficiency. But the publisher does not want to carry it. Duncan says his index which runs to 30 pages out of the 339 in the book, is the creation of Paula Clarke Bain, “who is a personal indexer and a human being”.

In all this bustling change there is a hint of a development I do not care for. There are other kinds of indexes aside from those at the back of books.

For much of my writing activities I have depended on newspaper indexes, at first in college on the index of the New York Times, later on the Official index of the Times of London and the index of the Glasgow Herald on the open shelves in the British Library, the National Newspaper Library and Trinity College here in Dublin.

But now these monuments of the Indexers’ skills have been banished into “dark storage”, a sort of intellectual perdition from which these printed objects will perhaps never emerge. Those librarians now devoted to digitalisation feel they are not needed, as the London Times is now available online. But such a search engine does not replace the columns of print.

Take say the Times Official Index for 1923. Looking up Ireland one finds something like four very closely printed pages in two columns divided into two parts, into Ireland, Northern and Ireland, Southern. One was visually able to see forming over the pages an epitome of a year’s history on this island in a difficult period through which you could follow the social, political and physical developments on this island, spread out before your very eyes.

You simply cannot do this by word search. So computerisation, in my opinion, rather than advancing the processes of research, are hiding them. Your word search item is torn out of its annual, local and international context, and often made meaningless.

This I am told is an outdated point of view. But it seems to me that those who remove the index volumes are the real Luddites, wrecking a long established ‘weaving frame’ of historical and intellectual research.

Dennis Duncan’s book explores whole centuries of investigation and deep inquiry. The human folly is part of the story. But then so are the mad vagaries of the present day internet.

Authors and readers hang onto you indexes as long as you can. They may well be the only things to save your minds in the years to come. Meanwhile, three cheers to the enterprising Dennis Duncan for such a lively recreation of an essential strand in Europe’s intellectual past.