A TIME New Yorker Financial Times and History Today Book of the YearHilarious Sam LeithI loved this book Susie DentWitty and affectionate Lynne TrussPerfect for book lovers a delightful history of the wonders to be found in the humble book indexMost of us give little thought to the back of the book its 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 shte 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 littleknown past. Here for the first time its story is told. Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenthcentury Europe to Silicon Valley in the twentyfirst 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 indexrakers at heart and we have been for eight hundred years.