Description
Most of us give little thought to the back of the bookits 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 shte 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 littleknown past
Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenthcentury Europe to Silicon Valley in the twentyfirst 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 andof courseindexers 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 indexrakers at heartand we have been for eight hundred years
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