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A place for everything : the curious history of alphabetical order / Judith Flanders.

by Flanders, Judith, author.

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New York : Basic Books, 2020.

Alphabetizing -- History.

Information organization -- History.

9781541675070 (hardcover) :

154167507X (hardcover)

xxviii, 319 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm

First US edition.

A is for antiquity: from the beginning to the classic world -- B is for the Benedictines: the monasteries and the Early Middle Ages -- C is for categories: authorities and organization, to the twelfth century -- D is for distinctiones: the High Middle Ages and the search tool -- E is for expansion: the reference work in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries -- F is for firsts: from the birth of printing to library catalogs in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries -- G is for government: bureaucracy and the office, from the sixteenth century to the French Revolution -- H is for history: libraries, research, and extracting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -- I is for index cards: from copy clerks to office supplies in the nineteenth century -- Y is for Y2K: from the phone book to hypertext in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries -- Timeline.

Few of us think much of the alphabet and its familiar sing-song order once we've learned it as children. 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. From the school register to the telephone book, from dictionaries and encyclopaedias to the library shelves, our lives are ordered from A to Z. 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. Alphabetical order allows us to sort, to file and to find the information we have, and to locate the information we need. 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.

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