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.

First I love the title. Index, A History is perfect. Secondly I love books about what at fist appear to be mundane subjects but when explored show how powerful some of the most useful and rarely thought about advances have been in history. I am reading this at the same time as The Swerve and these two really compliment each other in pointing out how important language and thought is and how we can more easily access it through the use of the index. Really great book for language nerds.

A sister book to A Place For Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order. Sometimes pedantic, sometimes deeply insightful, unfortunately Eurocentric.

To be completely fair, I am a library cataloger who toyed with the idea of becoming an indexer. I am absolutely the target audience for this. It was amazing. I love it. I want to give it to people as gifts. I loved this history and exploration about how we organize our thoughts when it comes to books. This is probably one of the most approachable explanations I've ever seen around the differences between an index and a concordance and why they are absolutely not interchangeable. This was a celebration of the dedication and humor that can be found when someone tries to capture the key points of someone else's argument. Informative and fun. An easy read about what in less deft hands could have been a slog. This is simply a delightful book that belongs on the shelf of any reader.

This book will be of great interest to anyone involved with the written word--authors, poets, and of course library and archives workers, booksellers, people who work in book publishing, and anyone with an interest in the subject. The book's style is written in a way that it is accessible to a wide audience so for instance, not just academics or scholarly audiences, which makes it more interesting and easy to follow. While the book can be a bit dense at times, getting bogged down in minute details, it nonetheless stands as a quality guide to the history of the index and much more.