A Place For Everything
The Curious History of Alphabetical Order
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Pan Macmillan
Published:6th Feb '20
Should be back in stock very soon
A celebration of alphabetical order, from its humble beginnings to its pre-eminence as the organizing principle for the sum of the world's knowledge.
A celebration of the alphabet, from its beginnings to its pre-eminence as the organizing principle for the world's knowledge.
'Marvellous . . . I read it with astonished delight . . . It is equally scholarly and entertaining.'- Jan Morris
'Quirky and compelling.'- The 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, 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. For, while the order of the alphabet itself became fixed very soon after letters were first invented, their ability to sort and store and organize proved far less obvious. To many of our forebears, the idea of of organizing things by the random chance of the alphabet rather than by established systems of hierarchy or typology lay somewhere between unthinkable and disrespectful.
A Place for Everything 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.
Marvellous . . . I read it with astonished delight . . . It is equally scholarly and entertaining. -- Jan Morris
Quirky and compelling . . . She is a meticulous historian with a taste for the offbeat; the story of the alphabet suits her well . . . Fascinating. -- Dan Jones * Sunday Times *
A library and academic essential. -- 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. -- Joe Moran * 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.’ -- Dennis Duncan * The Spectator *
Judith Flanders has a knack for making odd subjects accessible . . . In A Place for Everything, the popular historian paints alphabetisation as one of our most radical acts. . . Flanders retains a sense of fun . . . finds contemporary resonance in humanity's search for order. * i *
Praise for Judith Flanders' previous book, Christmas: A Biography: 'A catalogue of colourful information, and as surprising an assortment of items as any you might find heaped up under a tree.' -- Lucy Hughes-Hallett * Observer *
A well-researched account. There are more footnotes here than there are presents under a Rockefeller Christmas tree. Indeed, the book is stuffed with facts – enough to satiate even the most ravenous postprandial taste for quizzing. * Sunday Times *
[An] entertaining biography . . . Following the fine tradition of light entertainment Christmas books, Judith Flanders provides lots of trivia . . . However, there is much more to it than that. Flanders is a respected social historian, best known for studies on Victorian life, and the strength of this warm book lies in its quiet erudition. * The Times *
Judith Flanders . . . likes Christmas (I think), but she loves reality and its awkward, amusing facts. (A previous book of hers, Inside the Victorian Home, is deep, bright and encompassing.) * New York Times *
The non-fiction I most enjoyed . . . an excellent subject, carried out with exemplary care and authority. -- Philip Hensher * Spectator *
ISBN: 9781509881567
Dimensions: 220mm x 155mm x 40mm
Weight: 508g
272 pages