Index, a History of The

A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age

By: Dennis Duncan

Narrated by: Neil Gardner

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 shite 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 13th-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the 21st, Duncan uncovers how it has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office, and made us all into the people 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 800 years.

©2021 Dennis Duncan (P)2022 Tantor

We’ll written,

Adresses an important topic with excellent detail. Very helpful in training to improve thinking about literary topics.

interesting history, unusual as an audiobook

This is a fascinating history of book indexes, full of interesting stories marking their development. it is a little unusual as an audiobook since reading of sample indexes is not a normal audiobook activity. This gets particularly surreal when the author illustrates bad indexing and the reader has to slog through reading of, for instance, an index entry with far too many pages. In text, you go "yup, that's a lot of pages" and you move on. The poor reader spends three minutes reading each of dozens of page numbers. I found it hilarious, and oddly relaxing. The print version also has lots of figures that the audio version does not. I am glad I listened to it but also glad to have the print version.

Maybe a book that should be read rather than listened to

I’m either not the target audience or smart enough to follow all the lists, references, etc. that are employed here, but I’m pretty sure this is is one of the few books I’ve heard that I wished I had read the actual book instead.