For our members their book is not complete without an index and for most readers, it’s essential to their full enjoyment of the book.
Charting the index’s curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, writer, translator and lecturer in English at UCL, 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 critical role in our evolving literary and intellectual culture.
Tanya Izzard creates embedded and back-of-the-book indexes for academic and trade books working with publishers and directly with authors.. She was highly commended for the Betty Moys Award for the best newly qualified indexer in 2017. She is a member of the Society of Indexers Executive Board, with the role of Marketing Director.
Dennis Duncan has published numerous academic books as well as translations of Michel Foucault, Boris Vian, and Alfred Jarry. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books, and recent articles have considered Mallarmé and jugs, James Joyce and pornography, and the history of Times New Roman.
Together Duncan and Izzard will be our guides through the world of the Index calling on a fount of diverting anecdotes and showing that, for all our anxieties about the Age of Search, we are all index-rakers at heart, and we have been for eight hundred years.
Tickets: Please be in touch with [email protected]
Venue: Maggs Bros, 48 Bedford Square, WC1B 3DR
Time and date: 6.15pm for 6.30 to 8pm, Tuesday 25 October