Index, a history of the : a bookish adventure from medieval manuscripts to the digital age

Index, a history of the : a bookish adventure from medieval manuscripts to the digital age

History of the index

First American ed.

New York : W.W. Norton & Co., 2022.

vii, 343 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

025.309 D911 2022

(OCoLC)1252846057

First published in Great Britain under the title Index, a history of the : a bookish adventure.|Contents: Point of order: on alphabetical arrangement -- The births of the index: preaching and teaching -- Where would we be without it?: the miracle of the page number -- The map or the territory: the index on trial -- 'Let no damned Tory index my history!': sparring in the back pages -- Indexing fictions: naming was always a difficult art -- 'A keyto all knowledge': the universal index -- Ludmilla and Lotaria: The book index in the age of search -- Coda: archives of reading.|" ... Duncan reveals ... 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"--Provided by publisher.|Includes bibliographical references and index.|L2022M20

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