A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders

Any order that placed archangel after angel and God after them both would have been tantamount to blasphemy.Ī Place for Everything fascinatingly uncovers the story of the gradual triumph of alphabetical order, from its early days as a possible sorting tool in the Great Library of Alexandria in the third century BCE to its current decline in our age of Wikipedia and Google. To many of our forebears, the idea of organizing things by the alphabet rather than by established systems of hierarchy lay somewhere between unthinkable and disrespectful. While the order of the alphabet itself became fixed very soon after our letters were first invented, its use to sort and store and organize proved far less obvious. In this entirely original new book, Judith Flanders draws our attention both to the neglected ubiquity of the alphabet and the long and complex history of its rise to prominence. Alphabetical order allows us to sort, to file and to find the information we have, and to locate the information we need.

This magical system of organization not only guides us to the correct bus route or train schedule or the jar of coriander seeds between the cinnamon and the cumin in the supermarket, but it also, in the library or the bookshop, gives us the ability to sift through centuries of thought and writing, of knowledge and literature. From the school register to the telephone book, from dictionaries and encyclopaedias to the library shelves, our lives are ordered from A to Z. And yet the order of the alphabet, that simple knowledge that we take for granted, plays far more of a role in our lives than we usually consider. Few of us think much of the alphabet and its familiar sing-song order once we've learned it as children.

A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders