Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 23 reviews on
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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Find out why "Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age" by @djbduncan is one of TIME's 100 must-read books of 2022 https://t.co/InxGL89lyM
"As Dennis Duncan notes in his clever, sprightly Index, A History of the, the rise of the index in its current form is a story of many interrelated developments... Duncan is a brilliantly illuminating and wide-ranging guide across this richly varied terrain."
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Ever open a book and head straight to its index? Us too! @SLevelt reviews @djbduncan's _Index, A History of the_ for SHARP News, calling the book 'an eminently legible and appealing page-turner on the subject'. #BookStudies #BookHistory #publishing https://t.co/9krE4kfqhz