A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order

Historian Judith Flanders looks at how the alphabet ordered the world around us: combining features of academic research with the charms of gripping fiction, she describes the ways we organize our ideas about the surrounding reality using various symbolic systems—systems that are, one way or another, connected to the alphabet.

You’re about to make a real journey from the origins of human civilization to the 21st century to learn how, thanks to people like Samuel Pepys or Denis Diderot, the abilities to record information and systematize accumulated knowledge were formed—through the order in which the letters of human writing are arranged.

The title reflects the universality of the author’s approach: here you’ll find both an excursion into the history of linguistics and a study of the emergence of catalogs, along with an overview of the history of book publishing—from the Library of Alexandria to «Wikipedia». In short, in front of you—without exaggeration—a treasure trove of knowledge from A to Z (or from A to Z).