A place for everything The curious history of alphabetical order

This splendid book is about much more than alphabetical order. Flanders (Univ. of Buckingham), a social historian and critic, takes readers back 3,000 years to the commercial origins of the alphabet and right up to present-day hypertext, a new, decidedly non-alphabetic form of information retrieval. Along the way, one learns not just about the familiar uses of A--Z order--in dictionaries, indexes, concordances, cross-referencing, catalogs, directories, letter grades, and the like--but also about the subtle ways in which the technology of the alphabet (and paper) affected the world. The new technologies changed the way that law was done and how time was recorded, made folding money possible, and eventually yielded bureaucracy and modern business. Flanders organized the work in ten chronological chapters, each with an alphabetic title (for example, "A is for Antiquity," "I is for Index Cards"), showing how organization by letters supplanted earlier views of natural and divine order. Full of historical details and personalities and half-forgotten technology, A Place for Everything has a bit of everything, including more than 30 illustrations. A useful time line is included in the end matter, along with copious references. A must for those interested in the history of the book. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. --Edwin L. Battistella, Southern Oregon University

The centurieslong history of the evolution of the alphabet as we know it. In her latest, social historian and novelist Flanders tackles the curious history of alphabetical order. The author creates a fitting structure for the book, proceeding from "A Is for Antiquity" to "Y Is for Y2K" (not every letter gets its own chapter). Flanders moves from a discussion of language in the classical world all the way to the 21st century, with hypertext and other breakthroughs in language acquisition and absorption. It might seem like a relatively dull subject, but the author's prose is consistently engaging. "Writing is powerful because it transcends time," she writes, "and because it creates an artificial memory, or store of knowledge, a memory that can be located physically, be it on clay tablets, on walls, on stone, on bronze, papyrus, parchment or paper." Flanders introduces the Benedictine monks and their influential work in their monasteries, and after spending several chapters on the Middle Ages, she introduces the birth of printing as well as movable type and the first card catalogs. Flanders admits that while many history buffs think that alphabetization "followed hard on the heels of printing…the reality was less tidy, as reality usually is." Fascinating character sketches further the story, among them vibrant portraits of Samuel Pepys, John Locke, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but we should all hail librarians ("the institutional memory of their libraries") as the unsung heroes of this history. Flanders often points out that many of the advances in the organizing principles of the alphabet have been the result of constant experimentation rather than lightning-strike breakthroughs. For readers who love language or armchair historians interested in the evolution of linguistics, this is catnip. For the mildly curious, it's accessible, narratively adventurous, and surprisingly insightful about how the alphabet marks us all in some way. A rich cultural and linguistic history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.