It will come as no surprise here that I love books. I love the feel, the touch, the smell (mostly anyway). I like flipping through the pages (more these days to check on the size of the print because of aging eyes). And, I tend to start at the back with a note from the author, acknowledgments, and in the case of non-fiction, an index and/or bibliography. So, when I found Index, A History of the: a Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age, by Dennis Duncan, I knew it was a must read! (I even chuckled at the main title, in public!) Author is good ... he got my heart racing describing holding, and looking at, the book with the very first ever ... page number! (see p. 86) (Remember, books started as scrolls, so the look we know today was, at one time, a new invention). How to find something in a book soon followed ... with breaks in the text, new sections, then chapter headings and then lists, usually at the back, of where to find things. This lead to all sorts of controversy (seriously!) ... the concern was that readers would read JUST the index and not the book! Then it became popular for a rival, or even an enemy to make an index for a book that would include rude comments on the life, politics, education, and so on, of the author. For a while fiction books might have an index with references to tears, duels, crying, etc. (This did not last very long). The internet has changed the ways we search but consider this: when you use a search engine, the example given was with Google, you are searching with the Google index! All indexes are a reflection of the indexer. Don't miss the appendix at the end with a few pages of an index created by AI. It was not good! The book, however, was! :-)

Reading Hermit With Dog