A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders

sort by Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. 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. Rich and well-ordered, this study casts brilliant light… Curious facts tumble from the pages. Books by Judith Flanders (Author of The Invention of Murder) Books by Judith Flanders Judith Flanders Average rating 3.68 16,522 ratings 2,899 reviews shelved 72,056 times Showing 26 distinct works. Judith Flanders, one of Britains leading popular historians, takes us on an enlightening journey through the history of our age-old obsession long before Marie Kondo with sorting our stuff. It is long past time that this extraordinary development was celebrated. It may now be on its way out, as binary code replaces the need to know that O comes after N. The alphabet itself was the invention of ancient days, yet alphabetic order was the organizing principle that ushered in, and made possible, the modern world. Without alphabetic order, all the knowledge in the world would lie in great unsifted stacks of books, unfindable, unread, unknown.Ī Place for Everything traces the beginnings of alphabetization, as we understand it, moving from the development of what was, in effect, a sixteenth-century proto-card catalogue, to a London bookseller who made a revolutionary breakthrough when he alphabetized his books, not by lumping all the ‘Thomases’ together (Thomas More, Thomas Smith, Thomas Elyot), but by ‘sirname’. Alphabetic order allows us to locate the information we need, and disseminate it further. 24, 2015 Even in the insular world of book publishing, murder has its place. While we emphasize our subconscious appreciation for the importance of the alphabet, it is alphabetic order, its organization, that allows us to sift through the centuries of thought, of knowledge, of poetry, literature, scientific discovery and discourse.

A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders