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Index, a History of the

ebook

A New York Times Notable Book and Editors' Choice Book
A TIME, Washington Post, and New Yorker Best Book of 2022
A Book Marks Best Reviewed Book of 2022

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.


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Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Kindle Book

  • Release date: February 15, 2022

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9781324002550
  • Release date: February 15, 2022

EPUB ebook

  • ISBN: 9781324002550
  • File size: 29028 KB
  • Release date: February 15, 2022

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Formats

Kindle Book
OverDrive Read
EPUB ebook

subjects

History Nonfiction

Languages

English

A New York Times Notable Book and Editors' Choice Book
A TIME, Washington Post, and New Yorker Best Book of 2022
A Book Marks Best Reviewed Book of 2022

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.


Expand title description text
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