A Place for Everything

by Judith Flanders

Picador 272pp £16.99

The Week Bookshop £14.99

Judith Flanders is a “meticulous historian with a taste for the offbeat”, said Dan Jones in The Sunday Times. In this compelling book, she tackles a subject that “suits her well”: the history of alphabetical order. While the alphabet itself dates back some 4,000 years, it wasn’t until about 2,000 years after this that people began using it as an ordering tool: one of the first instances, according to Flanders, was at the Great Library in Alexandria, which burnt down in 48BC. For a long time after this, alphabetisation remained “one system among many”, often losing out to the medieval preference for “religious hierarchy”. A dictionary compiled by an abbot in tenth century England, for example, “first had entries pertaining to God and the heavens, before descending carefully from the sacred to the profane”.

It was the Renaissance that turned alphabetisation into the pre-eminent ordering device, said Libby Purves in The Times. After Gutenberg, printers embraced the ABC, and once each book had at last got the same page numbers (impossible in the days of hand copying), the alphabetical index was born. And yet alphabetical order continued to meet with resistance: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for instance, complained that the Encylopaedia Britannica was “a huge uncollected miscellany… in an arrangement determined by the accident of initial letters”. It’s a good moment to be telling the story of alphabetical order, just when digitisation seems poised to do away with it, said Joe Moran in The Guardian. “Who bothers with an A-Z atlas or a phone book in the age of the satnav and the search engine?” Despite feeling “exhaustively informative” at times, Flanders’s book tells “an intriguing history not just of alphabetical order, but of the human need for both pattern and intellectual efficiency”.