The Indexer's Revenge
“When the index [of Jack Pritchard’s textbook on obstetrics] appeared, it turned out that she [his wife Signe, the indexer, a nurse] had included the line “Chauvinism, male, variable amounts, 1–923” (i.e., on every page of the book). Four years later, for the next edition, she improved this to “Chauvinism, male, voluminous amounts, 1–1102” and added, for good measure, another judgment on the whole enterprise: “Labor—of love, hardly a, 1–1102.””
Fara Daboiwhala reviews Dennis Duncan’s “Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age” (Norton, 2022).