Libby Purves * The Times * One of the many fascinations of Judith Flanders's book is that it reveals what a weird, unlikely creation the alphabet is. Dan Jones * Sunday Times * A library and academic essential. She is a meticulous historian with a taste for the offbeat the story of the alphabet suits her well. It is equally scholarly and entertaining. Along the way, the reader is enlightened and entertained with a wonderful cast of unknown facts, characters and stories from the great collector Robert Cotton, who denominated his manuscripts with 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. 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. To many of our forebears, the idea of of organizing things by the random chance of the alphabet rather than by established systems of hierarchy or typology lay somewhere between unthinkable and disrespectful. For, while the order of the alphabet itself became fixed very soon after letters were first invented, their ability to sort and store and organize proved far less obvious. In A Place for Everything, acclaimed historian Judith Flanders draws our attention to both the neglected ubiquity of the alphabet and the long, complex history of its rise to prominence. Long before Google searches, this magical system of organization gave us the ability to sift through centuries of thought, knowledge and literature, allowing us to sort, to file, and to find the information we have, and to locate the information we need. From the school register to the telephone book, from dictionaries and encyclopaedias to library shelves, our lives are ordered from A to Z. And yet the order of the alphabet, that simple knowledge that we take for granted, plays a major role in our adult lives. It is equally scholarly and entertaining.' - Jan Morris 'Quirky and compelling.' - The Times Once we've learned it as children, few of us think much of the alphabet and its familiar sing-song order.

A place for everything judith flanders