Until about the end of the nineteenth century, books, fiction as well as non-fiction, sometimes had very detailed chapter titles, which could be several sentences long.

Among the first indexes - in the modern sense - to a book in the English language was Leonard Mascall's "A booke of the arte and maner how to plant and graffe all sortes of trees" printed in 1575. Another was one in Plutarch's Parallel Lives, in Sir Thomas North's