A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING

THE CURIOUS HISTORY OF ALPHABETICAL ORDER

JUDITH FLANDERS

Picador, 352pp, £16.99

As Joe Moran in the Guardian put it, ‘one of the many fascinations’ of Judith Flanders’s new book ‘is that it reveals what a weird, unlikely creation the alphabet is’. According to Dennis Duncan in the Spectator, we tend to take for granted that alphabetical order is the most effective form of cataloguing – yet ‘the medieval mind, trained to categorise, to look for God’s pattern in the world, was suspicious of its arbitrariness. The Romans, meanwhile, ran their vast and officious empire with little need of it. And at Harvard and Yale, graduating students were listed in order of their family’s social status until the late 1800s.’

In the Sunday Times, Dan Jones enjoyed a ‘delightfully quirky’ book which has put alphabetic order in its place among many systems ‘each providing a tantalising glimpse into the minds that dreamt them up’. Praising ‘a charming repository of idiosyncrasy, a love letter to literacy that rightly delights in alphabetisation’s exceptions as well as its rules’, Chris Allnutt in the

Financial Times hailed the democratising effect of alphabetic order which ‘enabled classifications that eschewed class, value or divine hierarchies’.

And Moran noted that the book may soon come to be an elegy to a lost form: ‘Who bothers with an A–Z atlas or a phone book in the age of the smartphone satnav and the search engine? Alphabetical order, which has stayed “invisible through its eight centuries of active duty”, in Flanders’s words, may already have begun its long, slow decline into irrelevance.’