Dennis Duncan

How to organise everything — Judith Flanders’s history of finding things

Alphabetical order is just one of many systems of indexing

In the middle of the last century, Robert Collison, one of the founders of the Society of Indexers, addressed himself to the question of what, exactly, an index is. In Collison’s loosest formulation, every time we organise the world around us so that we know where to find things, we are in fact indexing. He offers a pair of illustrations that could hardly be more 1950s if they were wearing brothel creepers:

When a housewife makes a separate place for everything in the kitchen she is in fact creating a living index, for not only she, but all her household, will gradually get used to the system she has created and be able to discover things for themselves… A man will get into the habit of always putting change in one pocket, keys in another, cigarette-case in a third — an elementary indexing habit which stands him in good stead when he checks up in his hurry to the station to see whether he has remembered his season-ticket.

Google’s parent company has become Alphabet – what took it so long?

A mental index: that’s how women find the sugar and men find their cigarette-cases.

This works smoothly enough up to a point. But what if a stranger needs to lay the table one day; or what if the system is larger than the ones in either of those two examples, if it runs to hundreds of items, all more or less the same in appearance? What if, to take another room in the house, it is the library rather than the kitchen that we need to navigate, in a hurry, without prior knowledge? This was the problem faced in Egypt, round about 300 bc, when the collection of the Library of Alexandria, under the aggressive acquisitions policy of the pharaoh, Ptolemy II, grew to several hundred thousand scrolls.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in