A Place for Everything
By Judith Flanders
A Curious History of Alphabetical Order. Basic Books, 2020.
Summary of A Place for Everything book by Judith Flanders
The fascinating tale of how alphabetical order came to dominate modern arrangements of information—whether it’s in books, libraries, or filing cabinets—and an account of why it may not be as intuitive as it seems to some today.
Chapters in A Place for Everything book summary
What do you get from this book? An exploration of how alphabetization became a cornerstone of modern information society
Written language enabled expanding societies, but most ancient civilizations didn’t recognize their alphabets’ sorting potential
Early alphabetical innovators—like Isidore of Seville—couldn’t break the hold of hierarchical ordering in priests’ libraries
The appearance of paper presented early medieval societies with new organizational demands, while universities needed more efficient research methods
From Amsterdam to Zurich, indexing helped Europe pave a path towards the intellectual explosion of the Renaissance
Printing took books to the people, while fashionable new herbal texts popularized alphabetical ordering
Lawyers and governments increasingly turned to alphabetization to tame the wild rise in documentation of the seventeenth century
While growing trade soon demanded novel ways of organizing information, scientists were testing methods to organize their data
Alphabetization earned new philosophical supporters—though some poets and thinkers complained, accusing it of “randomness”
Alphabetization helped build the modern office, where the newly-invented filing cabinet revolutionized workers’ access to information
Twentieth-century tech from the phone to the Internet has been enabled—and limited—by the Western reliance on alphabetical order
Summary of the key insights
Selected critiques in brief
Final word
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A Place for Everything — Book Summary Snapshot
Who should read A Place for Everything book
- Literature lovers
- fans of an unusual tale
- history enthusiasts
- those who long for a perfectly put-together bookshelf
About the author of A Place for Everything
Judith Flanders
Judith Flanders is a historian and journalist specializing in the history of the Victorian period. She has written for The Guardian, The Spectator, and The Times Literary Supplement. She was a historian and advisor in the production of video game Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, and her other publications include A Circle of Sisters (2001) and The Making of Home (2014).
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Thomas C. Foster
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