After the twelfth century some manuscript books carried tables, running heads, and even rudimentary indexes, which showed that Memory was already beginning to lose some of its ancient role. But retrieval became still easier when printed books had title pages and their pages were numbered. When they were equipped with indexes, as they sometimes were by the sixteenth century, then the only essential feat of Memory was to remember the order of the alphabet. Before the end of the eighteenth century the alphabetic index at the back of a book had become standard. The technology of Memory retrieval,
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