A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age
by Dennis Duncan
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Feb 2022
352 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
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.
40 illustrations
"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...Readers of this enlightening and entertaining survey won't take the humble index for granted again." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This may sound like dry stuff, but the narrative both sparkles with geeky wit (the plural form indices is 'for mathematicians and economists') and shines with an infectious enthusiasm...Always erudite, frequently funny, and often surprising—a treat for lovers of the book qua book." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] witty and wide-ranging study…[Duncan] is adventurous as well, often writing as if academic research were as revved-up as a Formula One race." - The Guardian (UK)
"Duncan proves an amiable companion on what his subtitle aptly refers to as a 'bookish adventure'…[U]seful as an introduction to book history in general as well as indexes in particular." - Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"Dennis Duncan's history―from Socrates to software―along with Paula Clarke Bain's peerless index, is witty and personable throughout, and also serves as a sneak attack on the search engine. It's safe to say that you will never take an index for granted again." - Mary Norris, author of Between You & Me and Greek to Me
"Entrancing.…Every page has things I didn't know, or hardly realized I knew from a lifetime of looking things up. Master the use of the index and you have access to all knowledge." - Christopher de Hamel, author of Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts
This information about Index, A History of the was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Dennis Duncan is a lecturer in English at University College London. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books, and he is the coeditor of Book Parts. He lives in London.
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