Producing an index is like squeezing “ a grape in a winepress”, wrote

a 19th-century French scholar, “so that not even tiniest drop of precious 【M1】__________

juice has been allowed to escape”. Reading an index is more like wine-

tasting. Take the smallest sap and you can guess the vintage. 【M2】__________

Indexes are to books like menus are to meals: often the best bit. 【M3】__________

The index should be prosaic—it is, after all, a mere tool—but it can

read like poetry. Indexes are a solution, but they are also a puzzle.

The indexes were both an aid and a problem of its own. “Many 【M4】__________

people read only them,” tutted the hard-to-please Erasmus. An anxiety

has always hung them—that, while they enhance convenience, they 【M5】__________

threaten serendipity. To claim to have read a book when you have only

read the index, said Jonathan Swift, “like a traveler claiming to describe 【M6】__________

a palace when he had seen anything but the privy. “ 【M7】__________

But indexes could and can be fun. Brevity is the soul of wit, and

what is briefer than an index? At times they were astonishingly

ambitious: the Victorians strive to produce a “key to all knowledge”. 【M8】__________

Like railways, an author rhapsodized, indexes have “cleared the way;

they have leveled mountains and straightened the most torturous paths…

What a timesaver!”

They are still saving time. Where Victorian keys to everything

failed, Google has succeeded, says Mr. Duncan. For what is the search

engine but a giant, electronic index? Type in the word, and everything

appears instant. What a timesaver! And yet it is hard not to feel, like 【M9】__________

Erasmus, that something has lost. The mountains have been leveled, the 【M10】_________

paths straightened. The serendipity has gone.

【M7】