Dennis Duncan - "Index, A History of the"

Amazing book about indexes and their history.

baindex.org - blog from a professional indexer

concordance; a list of all the words of a book/pamphlet and where they appear

subject index: index containing concepts and ideas (and where to find them), even when these are not literally mentioned/used in the text itself.

Two people came up with two important types of indexes roughly around the same time (11th/12th century). How that came about? From monks studying for days, people started to become more eloquent, to need to be able to read and find things themselves. Various "fraters", brothers (not monks!), e.g. Dominicans and Franciscans, preached in the common tongue. A growing demand for new, more efficient ways of reading, of using books.

Ptolemy's capital was the newly founded city of Alexandria, and it was here, around the beginning of the third century, that he built an institution in which the greatest scholars of the age would live, study and teach. It would be rather like a modern university - this is not the last time that the development of the university will prove pivotal for our story - and it would be dedicated to the muses, hence the name Mouseion, or in Latin Musaeum, which gives us our modern word museum.

Meanwhile, we may quibble over whether the Latin indices or the Anglicized indexes is the correct plural in English, but at least history has not plumped for the Greek: sillyboi.

the principle of the distinctio, of taking a topic - e.g. stone - and anatomizing it, exploding it into a variety of distinct sense, much like a dictionary entry will list the multiple meanings attached to a single word.

I am in the Bodleian Library in Oxford with a small printed book open on the desk in front of me. This is the text of a sermon, and it was printed in 1470 in Cologne a the printshop of a man named Arnold Therhoernen. The book is no larger than a paperback, and the text itself is short, just twelve leaves - twenty-four pages - long. But sitting here in the library with the book before me and opened on its first page, I think, the most intense experience that I have had of the archival sublime, that sense of disbelief that something so significant, something of such conceptual magnitude, should be here on my desk among my own workaday effects - laptop, notebook, pencil. It feels astonishing that I should be allowed to pick it up, hold it, turn its pages as though it were a novel I purchased at the train station. Why is it not under glass, sealed off, labelled and exhibited where crowds of schoolchildren might look but not touch? There's a name for this feeling: Stendhal Syndrome, after the French novelist who, on a visit to Florence, described the palpitation he experienced at being so close to the tombs of the Renaissance masters. I feel like I am on the verge of tears. [the J on the page is the first printed page number]

Most of the time, when we talk about books, about literature, we have no particular form in mind. It is not the actual book, the material object, but rather the text-in-the-abstract - words, plots, characters - that concerns us. Your copy or mine, first edition or cheap reprint, hardback, paperback or digital download, it doesn't matter: Jane still marries Mr Rochester in the end. But, reader, there is no such thing as an immaterial text. And however it is instantiated - whatever physical form it takes - we need to know that it works, that the words it delivers up to us are the right ones in the right order. What Calvino's [If On a Winter's Night a Traveller] novel does is remind us of the book itself, foregrounding its physical sequencing - something we take for granted - by removing it.

Italo Calvino - "Cosmicomics"

"actually, this was the first opportunity I had had to think something; or I should say: to think something had never been possible, first because there were no things to think about, and second because signs to think of them by were lacking, but from the moment there was that sign, it was possible for something thinking to think of a sign, and therefore that one, in the sense that the sign was the thing you could think about and also the sign of the thing thought, namely, itself."

"Our father's cry 'We're hitting something!' a meaningless expression (since before then nothing had ever hit anything, you can be sure), but one that took on meaning at the very moment it was uttered,"

"to think something had never been possible... and also the sign of the thing though, namely itself"... where a thought of something *is* that very something.

Italo Calvino - "The Baron in the Trees"

"There is the moment when the silence of the countryside gathers in the ear and breaks into a myria dof souds: a croaking and squeaking, a switft ruslte in the grass, a plop in the water, a pattering on earth and pebbles, and high above all, the call of the cicada."

"It should be said that in those days the winters in our parts were mild, and never had the freezing cold of nowadays which they say was loosed from its lair in Russia by Napoleon and followed him all the way here."

"I follow the news, read books, but they befuddle me. What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all-embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did. Only by being so frankly himself as he was til his death could he give something to all men."

"Ombrosa no longer exists. Looking at the empty sky, I ask myself if it ever did really exist. That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless, with the sky glimpsed only in sudden specks and splinters, perhaps it was only there so that my brother could pass through it with his tomtit's tread, was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and gaps, bursting at times into clear big berries, coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry seeds, then twisting away, forking off, surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and on and on until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends."

I liked it. I wasn't mesmerized by it but some passages caught my eye and held it. It was written in a most easy, eloquent style.