Index, a history of the : a bookish adventure / Dennis Duncan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Duncan, Dennis (Dennis J. B.), author.

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Indexes.

History.

Indexing.

Indexing--History.

Indexes--History.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xi, 339 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Other Title:

History of the index

Place of Publication:

[London] UK ; USA : Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2021.

Summary:

"Most of us give little thought to the back of the book - it's just where you go to look things up. But here, hiding in plain sight, is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. Here we might find Butchers, to be avoided, or Cows that sh-te Fire, or even catch Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne. This is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past. Here, for the first time, its story is told. Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Dennis Duncan reveals how the index 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.

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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 273-297) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Other Format:

ebook version :

Online version: Duncan, Dennis (Dennis J. B.). Index, a history of the.

ISBN:

9780241374238

0241374235

OCLC:

1225623682