Index, A History of the
A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Editors' Choice Book and a New Yorker Best Book of 2022 So Far
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Literary Hub and Goodreads
A playful history of the humble index and its outsized effect on our reading lives.
Most of us give little thought to the back of the book—it’s just where you go to look things up. But as Dennis Duncan reveals in this delightful and witty history, hiding in plain sight is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. In the pages of the index, we might find Butchers, to be avoided, or Cows that sh-te Fire, or even catch Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne. Here, for the first time, is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past.
Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Duncan uncovers how it has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office, and made us all into the readers we are today. We follow it through German print shops and Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists’ living rooms and university laboratories, encountering emperors and popes, philosophers and prime ministers, poets, librarians and—of course—indexers along the way. Revealing its vast role in our evolving literary and intellectual culture, Duncan shows that, for all our anxieties about the Age of Search, we are all index-rakers at heart—and we have been for eight hundred years.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Duncan (coeditor, Book Parts), a lecturer in English at University College London, mixes humor and scholarship to brilliant effect in this accessible deep dive into the history of indexes. Contending that indexes have had a profound yet overlooked impact on the evolution of human knowledge, he highlights key innovations in the centuries-long development of this search tool, including the trend towards putting words in alphabetical order; the shift from scrolls to codexes, whose page numbers were crucial to the creation of a usable index; and the rise of medieval universities, where scholars needed "new ways of efficiently finding parcels of text." Characterizing the index as the precursor to Google search, Duncan dismisses fears that an overreliance on search engines will diminish humans' cognitive abilities as "nothing more than a recent outbreak of an old fever." Despite long-standing worries that indexes will reduce engagement with books and alter reading habits and attention spans for the worse ("the book index: killing off experimental curiosity since the seventeenth century"), Duncan makes a persuasive argument that it is natural for reading methods and text technology to evolve in order to make information easier to find. Readers of this enlightening and entertaining survey won't take the humble index for granted again.
