Index, a History of The Audiobook By Dennis Duncan cover art

Index, a History of The

A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age

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Index, a History of The

By: Dennis Duncan
Narrated by: Neil Gardner
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About this listen

Most of us give little thought to the back of the book - it's 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 shite 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 little-known past.

Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of 13th-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the 21st, Duncan uncovers how it has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office, and made us all into the people 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 800 years.

©2021 Dennis Duncan (P)2022 Tantor
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I’m either not the target audience or smart enough to follow all the lists, references, etc. that are employed here, but I’m pretty sure this is is one of the few books I’ve heard that I wished I had read the actual book instead.

Maybe a book that should be read rather than listened to

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Adresses an important topic with excellent detail. Very helpful in training to improve thinking about literary topics.

We’ll written,

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This is a fascinating history of book indexes, full of interesting stories marking their development. it is a little unusual as an audiobook since reading of sample indexes is not a normal audiobook activity. This gets particularly surreal when the author illustrates bad indexing and the reader has to slog through reading of, for instance, an index entry with far too many pages. In text, you go "yup, that's a lot of pages" and you move on. The poor reader spends three minutes reading each of dozens of page numbers. I found it hilarious, and oddly relaxing. The print version also has lots of figures that the audio version does not. I am glad I listened to it but also glad to have the print version.

interesting history, unusual as an audiobook

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I never stopped to think about where indices come from, so the concept of the book intrigued me. The history in the beginning of the book is interesting. As the book proceeds it gets tedious listening to examples from the index currently being discussed. The author goes into too much detail about personalities and index writers undermining others or insulting their work to make them look incompetent. Others may enjoy this information, but it was not of interest to me.

Starts out interesting, but fades to tedium

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