Indexed

Abstract

The index in the modern, printed book can seem secondary, supplementary, and belated today—especially if we are reading the book in electronic form. But its past seems newly relevant as we work to construct continuous histories of the last few centuries of information management. Recent scholarly work on the book index often emphasizes it as form of totalizing information control that seeks to fend off information overload. But turning to the nineteenth-century theories and practices of Henry Wheatley, Charles Reade, John Todd, and the Dodgson family (Lewis Carroll and his sisters) reveals an idea of the index as extensible and connective. This extensible index renders the book unfinished, connecting it to places, persons, and things beyond its pages. To trace its history, we must grapple with the consequences of computation’s conceptual and literal remaking of the print index.