Name: A Place for Everything
ISBN: 9781541675070

Judith Flanders

From a New York Times-bestselling historian, the story of how the alphabet ordered our world A Place for Everything is the first-ever history of alphabetization, from the Library of Alexandria to Wikipedia. The story of alphabetical order has been shaped by some of history's most compelling characters, such as industrious and enthusiastic early adopter Samuel Pepys and dedicated alphabet champion Denis Diderot. But though even George Washington was a proponent, many others stuck to older forms of classification -- Yale listed its students by their family's social status until 1886. And yet, while the order of the alphabet now rules -- libraries, phone books, reference books, even the order of entry for the teams at the Olympic Games -- it has remained curiously invisible. With abundant inquisitiveness and wry humor, historian Judith Flanders traces the triumph of alphabetical order and offers a compendium of Western knowledge, from A to Z.

The Curious History of Alphabetical Order

A Place for Everything

Erin 

In probably the most boring thing I've ever done, I've now read a whole book on the history of alphabetical order. Except I don't think it's boring. The rest of the world may, but I think it's fascinating. I love organising things - particularly data. I work in a museum archive. My Goodreads shelves are a thing of genius. I create spreadsheets for fun and used to make Powerpoint presentations on my favourite animals and places I wanted to visit as a kid. So when I say this book was written exclusively for me, I say it with very little exaggeration. 

The research in this book is a thing of beauty. In fact, it's so beautiful, it's a bit unapproachable, like a museum artifact behind plexiglass. By far the most interesting, and the most accessible, chapters are the first few, as well as the last one. The rest in between can be a bit slow at times, and even I had droopy eyelids during 'F is for Firsts'. This isn't really the author's fault, however, but rather a lull in history in the progression of how people chose to organise their own book collections. There are still bits in those chapters that are interesting, largely revolving around the fact that standardization didn't even exist as a concept, and every single person and their institution had their own order in which they thought things to be most important. The first few chapters, the ones I think the general public, and not keener historians like me, would find the most interest in, talk a lot about why alphabetisation didn't even have a need to exist, because information didn't need to be ordered. As in, there was so little of it that people just simply memorised it. The Benedictine monks were expected to know each and every book in their library, where it was located, and what information was in it. Why does an index need to exist when you already know where everything is? I also thought it was really interesting to learn that alphabetisation was considered a subpar, blasphemous way of suggesting that one was simply too stupid to organise things any other way. Throughout my history degree I tended to lean towards learning about how religion (particularly Christianity) had shaped and formed the world as it developed, and the same goes for the organisation of information and how to access it. Hierarchical systems were paramount, with everything related to God coming first, and then slowly down the pecking order things were placed in relation. Deus was always listed before angel, despite D coming later in the alphabet than A, because God was above all things. The alphabet did exist of course, and did in fact have a specific order, but was not used as a method of ordering things and the idea that it could be the most useful was out of the question. The only places that had enough material to even need organising were monasteries or other religious institutions, and of course they would use the hierarchical system with God as the highest.

Anyone who has a knack for it or takes pleasure in organising and making things as efficient as possible will appreciate this book. However as I mentioned, it does get into nitty gritty detail, and let’s face it, everything with a history will inevitably have slow points. But I think it does prove to be incredibly interesting, and even if you didn’t have any interest at all, I’m sure you would be fascinated (or at least humoured) to know how begrudgingly stubborn humans have remained throughout history. As a species, we just do not like change. Even when it comes to the alphabet, something we all take for granted. We also don’t realise how even alphabetical order, something that is the most neutral way of organising things, still isn’t completely unbiased. What about all those languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet or use other non-alphabetic writing forms? They are forced to adapt and mold their cultures, much older and lengthy than most of ours, which hardly seems fair. 

I have a lot more passages and paragraphs highlighted that I would love to share, but I am aware that not nearly as many people as I’d like would find that as interesting as I do. I’m in enough danger in turning this into a term paper as it is. In summary, if you find this topic interesting but not quite interesting enough to read how specific people ordered their books in the 15th century, definitely skim the first few chapters as well as the last one, which jumps to the 21st century and our own modern ways of organisation (and the subsequent downgrade of alphabetic order as even really that necessary when information can be received nearly instantly rather than having to search for it). For the rest of us nerds who crave this kind of order, this is exactly what we wanted. You’re welcome.

I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

'A delightfully quirky sturdy . . . [Flanders] is a meticulour historian with a taste for the offbeat; the story of the alphabet suits her well . . . Fascinating.' Sunday Times 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 continues to play a major role in our adult lives. From school registers to electoral rolls, from dictionaries and encyclopaedias to library shelves, our lives have been ordered from A to Z. Long before Google searches, this magical system of organization gave us the ability to sort through centuries of thought, knowledge and literature, allowing us to sift, file, and find the information we have, and to locate the information we need. In A Place for Everything, acclaimed historian Judith Flanders fascinatingly lays out the gradual triumph of alphabetical order, from its use as a sorting tool in the Great Library of Alexandria to its current decline in prominence in the digital age. Along the way, the reader encounters a wonderful cast of characters,from the great collector Robert Cotton, who catalogued his manuscripts by 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. 'One of the many fascinations of Judith Flanders' book is that it reveals what a weird, unlikely creation the alphabet is.' Guardian

A Place for Everything The Curious History of Alphabetical Order

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