Did you read the book?
The book is from 2005. Lists are introduced in chapter 3 with a practical example, a simple database.
The Touretzky edition I mentioned is from 1990.
Actually lists are the main fundamental data type in Lisp (well, it's also called as an abbreviation of 'List Processor'), which sets it apart from many other programming languages and is the reason of its existence. The basic idea of Lisp is that one can do many practical things with lists.
Let's look further in your claim that it would be hard to find introductory Lisp books with mentioning arrays.
Paul Graham wrote published in 1996 the book ANSI Common Lisp. Arrays appear in chapter 4 together with strings (1d arrays/ vectors), sequences (a data type joining lists and vectors), structures (records) and hash tables.
Winston&Horn, 3rd Edition of 1989. Arrays are in chapter 11. But from that book we get a good idea through practical examples that one can do a lot of interesting things with lists.
Another book, the 'Common Lisp Companion' from 1990. Vectors, strings, arrays, sequences, hash-tables appear in chapter 4.
> Perl was dominant
for text processing and early web server scripting...
For example I can't remember much in NeXTStep or MacOS that made use of Perl (or Lisp) in any crucial way. The OS and its applications were written largely in C, C++ and Objective C.
"COMMON LISP: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation, from 1990"--Um, wow, a whopping 17 PAGES out of 500+ (5 for hash tables) on nominally the two most useful data structures in all computer programming. (Side note: I had an actual dead tree edition of Touretzky from CMU in 1986?--I don't remember hashes in it--I think that was an add-on later). And, even 1990 is after Lisp starts getting displaced (Tcl, Perl, Python, etc. are all coming online).
The Perl4 Camel Book cookbook section was practically an existence proof for "Show people how to do useful things in your language and they will flock to you."
In addition, "Hash all the things!" was practically Perl's motto, and it wiped the floor with everything else for a VERY long time (something like 1994-2005--for 10+ years Perl was dominant).