Dennis DuncanCríticas

Fun take on book history. Takes you into all sorts of topics like alphabetical order in different cultures, and how people used books when they were scrolls. Also the tricky time when books had indexes but not page numbers!

an interesting exploration of how the index came to be and whether it still has relevnce in the age of the search bar ( It does). so many things tha we take for granted in books, even page numbers, had their oriin somewhere and this book relates their origin stories with some humor and lots of appreciation

A fun book, I probably would have preferred more history and less adventure: the author focuses on the droll, at the expense of the typical. It also seemed a wee bit teleological, something I've noticed in other books on older information technologies: an attempt to show that the World Wide Web represents continuity, not disruption, and that its impact on our reading is not disruptive so much as simply another development in a long series of changes. Which after all might be true, but it seems to me the jury is still out on that question.

I wanted to love this book, but I only liked it.

Duncan begins at monasteries in the Middle Ages, and finishes at Google. He touches on all the different kinds of indexes -- concordance, subject, table of contents, more -- that have appeared over time. He tells some good stories and shares some amusing and instructive examples.

As befits a work with this title and topic, fully 40% of the book is end matter. There are two different indexes to compare -- one created by computer, using the best available current software, and one created by a human being. The human index is the hands-down winner.

I am a bibliophile and a tech nerd, so very much in the demographic for this book. I found it only interesting. I recommend it, but I wish I had loved it.

Overall, remarkably boring. Given the amount of press and buzz this has received, I feel compelled to say that the book has no story.

This might seem like a dry subject, but the book is both fascinating and fun to read. Don’t skip the index!

Delightfully entertaining, recommended for those with a bibliographic bent½

There were these little sprinkles of fascinating information throughout this book, but they were so sparse that I was quite bored the rest of the time. It might have been nice for him to find some more actual indexers (or perhaps some retired ones) to learn more about their experiences too; I've read enough Barbara Pym that it actually seems like a really interesting job to me, but I honestly can't remember if the author talks about the future of it or if the role is dying out in this day and age.½

A lot of fun, like attending a class whose lecturer turns out to be TED talk entertaining, but with a better sense of humor. Best chapter: the story of a period in British history when politico-academic feuds were conducted by republishing an opponent's work with a new, mocking index. Bonus: this book's own index is fun to read, with lots of "easter eggs" (hidden jokes and special features). Recommended to anyone who's ever depended upon an index, or even enjoyed one.

I confess: I picked this book out on title alone. It's clever. And I love books about books and their history - I have a small collection of and about dictionaries, for example - but this topic was a little new for me. And you may be excused for thinking that a book about that end of the book, helpful to browse through when you're looking to research a topic or see where, say, Churchill is mentioned would be dry and dull unless you were an academic or someone who otherwise had a very specific interest in the topic.

If that's your impression, you'd be wrong about this book. Duncan takes the history of the index and not only covers the basics - such as early concordances, adding Bible chapter and verses, page numbers - but also makes the personalities of some of the people who argued about (and through!) indexes come alive. This is witty, humorous, and accessible. I grant you it may still be for a very select audience of book lovers, but if you're at all on the fence about it, I urge you to try it and see if you don't come away with an appreciation into what went into creating this particular way we organize information. If you have any doubt on where I came down on it, I'll just say... I even read the index.½

As a bookworm, I was hoping I'd find a fascinating history here of a much-used, totally taken for granted feature of non-fiction books: the humble index. I love indexes! Sadly, this book was rather dry, with the exception of the occasional anecdote about how someone used their index to take a dig at someone else.

Thanks to NetGalley and W.W. Norton & Company for the digital review copy.

What a delight; a dry witty book about what would seem on the face of it like the dullest of subjects—the history of the index. Sprinkled with asides, like the fact that the first publication of the Index Society, Henry Wheatley's 1878 What Is An Index, had no index. The index of the book itself, made it is stressed by an actual human indexer, is superb and also sprinkled with jokes.

Ok book, some interesting history, told with educated British wit, but far too long given the subject matter.

A better book for most people is Judith Flanders’ “A place For Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order.” It also covers the history of indexing but puts it in a much broader context of how people through history organized and dealt with texts in general.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51770484

If you read the Flanders book and -still- want to know more about indexes then check this one out. I didn’t really need to know more about the history of indexes but I read a good review of the book so I reserved it. But for a general reader I think the Flanders book is much more educational and more fun.

The author makes a good distinction between the subject index and the known item index (a.k.a. concordance). Recommended for librarians and other individuals interested in the classification of human knowledge.½

The text is abnormally large and the digressions lengthy. Interesting at times but this would have made a better article as there's not enough information to sustain book-length attention here.

"A New York Times Editors' Choice Book and a New Yorker Best Book of 2022 So Far". Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Literary Hub **and Goodreads"

The week after I finished this book I referred to the index of a huge, hard-cover non-fiction book I am reading. The entry I needed wasn't there! Of course I immediately thought of this excellent book. I very much enjoyed reading the history of the index and it's predecessors. Dennis Duncan is a good writer. The text is erudite and fun to read. I recommend this book highly.

An interesting history of something that seems so commonplace and natural as to have always been: the index. Like A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order, this is a good book for the bookish, academic, historianish types who like the history of the book. How did indices and their cousins the concordance develop? Along the way you get the history of books, printing, dictionaries, and "book parts." Lots of uses of indexes, for commentary, for fiction, et cetera. Lots of interesting stories, facts, and ephemera. With endnotes, a list of figures, two indexes, and images. The only thing I could complain about is I wish there were twice as many images.

I punted on listening to this book after a third of it. It was pretty boring, especially as an audio book. For instance, in one part Duncan lists all of the index entries for a topic from one particular book. It went on and on for probably three or four minutes straight. In print form, a reader could just skip ahead after getting the point, but when listening to the book, the listener has to sit through all of that. I decided enough was enough and quit listening, which isn’t typical of me.

2022 Book #49. 2022. You probably know that the index of a book can be quite useful. An interesting look at how the book index was developed and how it has morphed into the Internet age. A little dry in parts but I liked it.

The title of this book by Dennis Duncan, with its words ordered as they might appear in an index entry, is a hint of the clever and witty writing contained inside. Who knew that the index - that set of pages at the back of (mostly nonfiction) books - had such a long and interesting history? It seems that Dennis Duncan knew.

Duncan, a professor of English at University College London, has an interest in the history of books. His previous book, co-edited with Adam Smyth, was called Book Parts, with chapters focused on all the pieces of a book that aren’t the main text.

Index, A History of the takes a deep dive into just one part of a book, exploring the history of indexes (or indices if you prefer the more latinesque form). Duncan tackles the topic with evident fondness and more than a little humor. We ARE talking about indexes, however, so at times the story does get a bit dry. But Gardner does a great job of keeping the reading light and between the narrator and the author even the driest parts don't seem that bad.

The index as we think of it today first sprang forth in the 13th century as an aid to monks and priests in locating specific passages in the Bible. As copies of the bible at that time were only available in manuscript form, each one unique from the next, so indexes themselves could only be specific to one manuscript.

An index entry, after all, has two key pieces to it - the thing you are searching for, and the place in the text where you can find it. But every manuscript of the Bible was unique, with no standard for text size or page numbers, and no agreement as to how many chapters a specific book in the Bible had, or where the breaks between chapters were.

As time went on the index idea spread to books that weren’t the Bible, making page numbering (so indexes would have places for their entries to refer to) an important consideration in the construction of a book.

Duncan also explores how the index came to be used in fiction as well, at least for a time, as well as how authors of fiction began to pen stories and novels that used the index as the form in which to tell their stories.

Later, Duncan brings us into the present day, and explores the relevance of indexes in an age where book contents in digital form can be easily searched. Indexes, the author argues, are not simply providing pointers to individual words in a book. Rather, they are the product of “deep reading” and rely on human knowledge and ability to draw out the important ideas in a written work, and to organize the book’s index in a way that points out the connections in the work to those ideas. In that way then, every index is a record of an individual deep reading of a book.

I listened to the audiobook edition narrated by British narrator Neil Gardner. Gardner did an excellent job. The only distraction was his occasional attempt to render a quote from an American in an American accent. This added an unintentional bit of humor.

It might seem a bit odd to read a book about a “book part” in an audio format. I know I missed a few things from the written edition. First, this book’s own index is said to be “magnificent” (according to the reviewer in the Washington Post), but it is not included in the audio (and likely wouldn’t be appreciated there). And second, there are 40 illustrations in the written book that I didn’t have access to. But I did get a well done reading by Gardner.

This is a microhistory, so by definition it’s a niche book. But, it’s done with enough humor and fondness that I think it might appeal even if you are only marginally interested in the idea at first. Overall it’s a book of interest both to academics and to mere book readers who might want to explore the history and importance of indexes.

RATING: Three Stars ⭐⭐⭐

An interesting entry in the "history of a closely-observed object/idea"—although it's actually even more narrowly focused than the title would indicate, since Dennis Duncan focuses almost entirely on indexes in the Western world, and largely on Anglophone indexes at that. I've read enough about the topic enough before now that the medieval/early modern sections didn't tell me much new, and I wanted more heft/info in the section about how search engines (the modern equivalent of concordances) work, because that's something I know less about and because the decisions that Google et al are often much more opaque, it seems, than those made by people centuries ago.

This is a book about how information technology can be beautiful, and Duncan does not shy away from his admiration of those who invented the Index on the fly.. He grudgingly accepts Tables Of Contents as a kind of index, but will also show how tawdry they can be too. Dennis Duncan knows Indexes, he has studied them and will continue to study them. And this book, despite its flippant fun title, gets the non-fiction balance just right. There is scholarship galore here, from Greek letters to a romp through indexes of the bible, all the way up to the death and rebirth of the index Duncan's deep love of the subject shines brightly and definitely contributed to the perfection of the design of this book.

I admit, I am certainly the target audience for this book so I may be a bit biased but I was overjoyed by every turn of every page of this book.

Thank you so much to netgalley and Dennis Duncan for providing an e-copy for me to experience and share my honest opinion. I will be geeking out over this book for the foreseeable future!

This is a delightful history of the index! The history is largely anecdotal: Duncan focuses a lot on a few specific indexes. Some of them get his attention because they were influential in the history of the book and the organization of knowledge, and some get his attention because they're a lot of fun (there's a whole chapter devoted to the index as a tool of snarky intellectual roasting). There are some topics that are missing, such as the interplay between indexing and standardized spelling (how do you put things in alphabetical order when everybody spells differently?), and the relationship between indexing inside and outside of books (how did the index interact with library catalogues and other information organization systems?). The chapter on search engines and how they have changed our access to information also felt slim.... But those are minor criticisms because this is a delightful and interesting book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the index: it was probably the best part of the book because it is not only full of jokes but also directly illustrates some of the things Duncan discussed in the book.

An entertaining and erudite history of the index that thoroughly appealed to the part of my brain that is fascinated by how we organize, search, and locate information. Duncan's work is well-researched but also highly readable with plenty of allusions to familiar cultural touchstones and not just obscure medieval texts (although be warned he does spoil the whodunnit of The ABC Murders). The work also includes excellent endnotes and, of course, a gorgeous index whose creator he gives full credit. Fans of book history as well as those interested in information architecture and searching tools will find things to enjoy here.

This delightful book belongs in the company of other like A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order and The Footnote: A Curious History, which force us to more to the foreground something that we take for granted and treat as so obvious as to not have a history of its own.½