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  • The American Scholar

    Making the List

    Mar 01, 2022 3 minutes
    Review by Charles Trueheart

    INDEX, A HISTORY OF THE: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age

    BY DENNIS DUNCAN

    Norton, 352 pp., $30

    TO UNDERSTAND WHAT an index is, it may help to begin with what it is not.

    An index is not a table of contents—such a table would feed multitudes—but it does lay out in more granular form all of the contents of a book. An index is not a concordance, strictly speaking, although they are cousins. A concordance reverentially locates every instance of every significant word of a text—the Bible, originally.

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