A Place for Everything - The Story of Alphabetical Order

Author(s): Judith Flanders

History

A celebration of alphabetical order, from its humble beginnings to its pre-eminence as the organizing principle for the sum of the world's knowledge.


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, knowledge, poetry, literature, scientific discovery and discourse.


Alphabetic order allows us to locate the information we need, and disseminate it further. Without alphabetic order, all the knowledge in the world would lie in great unsifted stacks of books, unfindable, unread, unknown.


A 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 'Thomas'es together (Thomas More, Thomas Smith, Thomas Elyot), but by surname.


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. It may now be on its way out, as binary code replaces the need to know that O comes after N. It is long past time that this extraordinary development was celebrated.

$34.99 AUD

Stock: 0


Add to Wishlist


Product Information

General Fields

  • : 9781509881567
  • : Pan Macmillan
  • : Picador
  • : 0.01
  • : August 2019
  • : ---length:- '9.21'width:- '6.02'units:- Inches
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Judith Flanders
  • : Hardback
  • : 272