A Place For Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order
Feb 2020 · Pan Macmillan
Ebook
272
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About this ebook
'A delightfully quirky sturdy . . . [Flanders] is a meticulour historian with a taste for the offbeat; the story of the alphabet suits her well . . . Fascinating.' Sunday 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 continues to play a major role in our adult lives. From school registers to electoral rolls, from dictionaries and encyclopaedias to library shelves, our lives have been ordered from A to Z. Long before Google searches, this magical system of organization gave us the ability to sort through centuries of thought, knowledge and literature, allowing us to sift, file, and find the information we have, and to locate the information we need.
In A Place for Everything, acclaimed historian Judith Flanders fascinatingly lays out the gradual triumph of alphabetical order, from its use as a sorting tool in the Great Library of Alexandria to its current decline in prominence in the digital age. Along the way, the reader encounters a wonderful cast of characters,from the great collector Robert Cotton, who catalogued his manuscripts by 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.
'One of the many fascinations of Judith Flanders' book is that it reveals what a weird, unlikely creation the alphabet is.' Guardian
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 continues to play a major role in our adult lives. From school registers to electoral rolls, from dictionaries and encyclopaedias to library shelves, our lives have been ordered from A to Z. Long before Google searches, this magical system of organization gave us the ability to sort through centuries of thought, knowledge and literature, allowing us to sift, file, and find the information we have, and to locate the information we need.
In A Place for Everything, acclaimed historian Judith Flanders fascinatingly lays out the gradual triumph of alphabetical order, from its use as a sorting tool in the Great Library of Alexandria to its current decline in prominence in the digital age. Along the way, the reader encounters a wonderful cast of characters,from the great collector Robert Cotton, who catalogued his manuscripts by 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.
'One of the many fascinations of Judith Flanders' book is that it reveals what a weird, unlikely creation the alphabet is.' Guardian
About the author
Judith Flanders is the author of the bestselling The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed; A Circle of Sisters, which was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award; the New York Times bestselling The Invention of Murder, shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction; The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London, shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times History Book of the Year; The Making of Home and Christmas, A Biography. In her copious leisure time, she also writes the Sam Clair series of comic crime novels.
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