Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 343

 

Here is an excerpt from a book I recently read, "Index, a History of the  A Bookish Adventure From Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age," by Dennis Duncan.

It is not hard to see why the index is an invention of the codex era, and not the age of the scroll. It is a truly random-access technology, and as such it relies on a form of the book that can be opened with as much ease in the middle, or at the end, as at the beginning. The codex is the medium in which the index first makes sense.