A Place for Everything, Judith Flanders
A Place for Everything, Judith Flanders
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A Place for Everything
The Curious History of Alphabetical Order

Author: Judith Flanders

Narrator: Julia Winwood

Unabridged: 10 hr 31 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 10/20/2020

Synopsis

From a New York Times-bestselling historian comes 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.

A Times (UK) Best Book of 2020

About Judith Flanders

Judith Flanders is a New York Times bestselling author and one of the foremost social historians of the Victorian era. Her The Victorian City was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Judith is also the author of a crime fiction series, beginning with A Murder of Magpies. She lives in London.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Mandy on September 14, 2020

An astonishing amount of research has gone into this book and it’s an exhaustive – and unfortunately rather exhausting -exploration of how we learnt to order and classify things, and how although alphabetical order seems so intuitive to us now, something we just take for granted, it wasn’t always th......more

Goodreads review by David on August 01, 2020

The latest shibboleth of western imperialism to come under the magnifying glass is the alphabet. We in the West think of it as standard and intuitive, its powers innate, and its services universal. Judith Flanders is here to remind us it has a long tortured history to get to this hallowed status. An......more

Goodreads review by Erin on October 18, 2020

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......more

Goodreads review by Shelby on January 22, 2021

This book felt like an extension of my library & information science courses, covering cataloging and classification schemes, the history of books and media, subject headings, and information organization. I found this book to be a little dry — "duh, Shelby," you cry. "It's a book about alphabetizat......more

Quotes

"Fascinating... A Place for Everything rewards us with a fresh take on our quest to stockpile knowledge. It feels particularly relevant now that search engines are rendering old ways of organizing information obsolete...That we have acquired so much knowledge is astounding; that we have devised ways to find what we need to know quickly is what merits this original and impressive book."—New York Times

"Fascinating . . . truly revelatory"—Wall Street Journal

"One of the many fascinations of Judith Flanders's book is that it reveals what a weird, unlikely creation the alphabet is...an intriguing history not just of alphabetical order but of the human need for both pattern and intellectual efficiency."—Guardian

"A charming repository of idiosyncrasy, a love letter to literacy that rightly delights in alphabetisation's exceptions as much as its rules."—Financial Times

“This is an utterly charming book, packed with engrossing details.”—The Times (UK)

"For readers who love language or armchair historians interested in the evolution of linguistics, this is catnip. For the mildly curious, it's accessible, narratively adventurous, and surprisingly insightful about how the alphabet marks us all in some way...A rich cultural and linguistic history."—Kirkus

"A Place for Everything presents itself as a history of alphabetical order, but in fact it is much 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."—The Spectator

"A library and academic essential rather than a catchpenny popular read (that, by the way, is a compliment)."—The Times of London

"Quirky and compelling... [Flanders] is a meticulous historian with a taste for the offbeat; the story of alphabetical order suits her well."— Dan Jones, Sunday Times (UK)

"Surprising and copiously researched."—Times Literary Supplement

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