Index, A History of the:

 

I received a copy of this release from the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Title: Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age
Author: Dennis Duncan
Publisher: W. W. Norton Company
Release Date: 2.15.22


Publisher’s 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 is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known history.

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. Duncan reveals the vast role of the index in our evolving literary and intellectual culture, and he shows that in the Age of Search we are all index-rakers at heart.


My Review
Not everyone will be interested in the history of the index, but there are some word nerds who will. Do you love books about books? Do you love learning about the history of books? Then you will likely love this! I have was intrigued when I learned about the dictionary wars so I had to know how this deep dive stacked up. The history of the index is filled with just as much politics, arguments, and competitions as the dictionary wars. This book is super niche and at times a bit *unexciting* but I feel like it would be embraced by most of the Bookstagram community.