*A TIME New Yorker Financial Times and History Today Book of the Year* 'Hilarious' Sam
Leith 'I loved this book' Susie Dent' 'Witty and affectionate' Lynne Truss Perfect for book
lovers a delightful history of the wonders to be found in the humble book index 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.
