A Place For Everything

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Once we've learned it as children, few of us think much of the alphabet and its familiar sing-song order. And yet the order of the alphabet, that simple knowledge that we take for granted, plays a major role in our adult lives. From the school register to the telephone book, from dictionaries and encyclopaedias to library shelves, our lives are ordered from A to Z. Long before Google searches, this magical system of organization gave us the ability to sift through centuries of thought, knowledge and literature, allowing us to sort, to file and to find the information we have, and to locate the information we need.In A Place for Everything, acclaimed historian Judith Flanders draws our attention to both the neglected ubiquity of the alphabet and the long, complex history of its rise to prominence. She fascinatingly lays out the gradual triumph of alphabetical order, from its possible earliest days as a sorting tool in the Great Library of Alexandria in the third century bce, to its current decline in prominence in our digital age of Wikipedia and Google. Along the way, the reader is enlightened and entertained with a wonderful cast of unknown facts, characters and stories, from the great collector Robert Cotton, who denominated his manuscripts with the names of the busts of the Roman emperors surmounting his book cases, to the unassuming sixteenth-century London bookseller who ushered in a revolution by listing his authors by 'sirname' first.'A delightfully quirky study . . . She is a meticulous historian with a taste for the offbeat, the story of the alphabet suits her well. . . . fascinating'.Sunday Times 'A library and academic essential rather than a catchpenny popular read (that by the way is a compliment.)'Libby Purves, The Times 'One of the many fascinations of Judith Flanders's book is that it reveals what a weird, unlikely creation the alphabet is.'Guardian 'Judith Flanders's A Place for Everything presents itself as a history of alphabetical order, but in fact it is more than that. Rather, as the title suggests, it offers something like a general history of the various ways humans have sorted and filed the world around them - a Collison-level view of the matter, in which alphabetical order is just one system among many.'Spectator