The other day I read this tempting Nugget of Nerdy Knowledge in Prospect, a UK magazine that’s not supposed to be for illiterates.
“Early indexes, concordances and distinctiones had been around for a long time before the index blossomed into something like its modern form. It was the arrival of printed page numbers that helped firm things up. At the Bodleian Library, [Dennis] Duncan gets his hands on the first extant example of the printed page number, in a short sermon produced in Cologne in 1470, and describes it as ‘the most intense experience that I have had of the archival sublime’.”
Ha! It took me approximately 12 seconds to pull up an image of a Chinese printed book (an edition of the poems of Du Fu) with page numbers from some 250 years previous, https://www.loc.gov/resource/lcnclscd.2014514276.1A000/?sp=3&r=-0.067,0.247,1.362,0.558,0
And I make no claim for this book’s being the first of that kind. Sorry, Duncan, your “archival sublime” was grape juice mislabeled as Thunderbird.
My personal dream is to teach in a classroom where that kind of myopia doesn’t get off easy— where “the earliest one I know about” isn’t the same thing as “the earliest one in the world.” Or “the best,” “the greatest,” “the most significant,” etc., in the world; a classroom, in short, where we all know that there is a lot of history outside of what we’re used to seeing presented as History, and that such history is accessible and discussable.
But on that, more in another post.
This is the greatest post in history
And a bigger pond for you too, sir!