Love letter to literacy encompassing quirks of life before the Alphabet

 

Judith Flanders, a New York Times-bestselling historian, in her latest book “A Place For Everything” is the story of how the alphabet order our world from the library of Alexandria in the third century BCE,  to Wikipedia and Google,  reveals what a bizarre, improbable creation of the alphabet is as writing has been invented independently three times in different parts of the world.

The Alphabet that simple knowledge that we take for granted, plays a major role in our adult lives including its familiar sing-song order.

 From the school register to the telephone book, from dictionaries and encyclopaedias to library shelves, our lives are ordered from A to Z. Lond before Google searches, Alphabet’s magical system of organisation gave the ability to sift through centuries of thought, knowledge and literature, allowing us to sort, to file, and to find information we have,  and to locate information we need.

Flanders throws light on both the neglected ubiquity of the alphabet and the long, complex history of its rise to prominence.

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 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.

For a 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.

For many the idea of organising things by the random chance of the alphabet rather than by established  systems of hierarchy or typology lay somewhere between unthinkable and disrespectful.

A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order by Judith Flanders, Picador £16.99, 272 pages.