A Place For Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order

Historian Judith Flanders examines how the alphabet has ordered the world around us: combining features of academic research and fascinating fiction, she describes the ways in which our ideas about reality are organized through various symbolic systems in one way or another related to the alphabet. You will take a real journey from the origins of human civilization to the twenty-first century to discover how, thanks to people like Samuel Pepys or Denis Diderot, the ability to capture information and systematize accumulated knowledge was formed through the order in which the letters of human writing are arranged. The title reflects the universality of the author's approach: you will find here an excursion into the history of linguistics, a study of the origins of catalogs, and an overview of the history of book publishing from the Library of Alexandria to Wikipedia. In short, it is literally a treasure trove of knowledge from A to Z (or A to Z).