A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING
The Curious History of Alphabetical Order
By Judith Flanders
In Nick Hornby’s novel “High Fidelity,” a record-store owner named Rob Fleming commemorates a bad breakup by reorganizing his vinyl collection. He decides to order his records not alphabetically, but personally — by when each of the hundreds in his collection entered his life. After he’s finished, he’s “flushed with a sense of self, because this, after all, is who I am.” That only he can discern the order is the point of the exercise. “If I want to play, say, ‘Blue’ by Joni Mitchell, I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the autumn of 1983, and thought better of giving it to her, for reasons I don’t really want to go into.”
In a way, Judith Flanders’s fascinating new book, “A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order,” is a meditation on Rob’s task: What does the way we order knowledge reveal about how we see knowledge itself? Inventions vital to the information age, like the printing press and the transistor, didn’t create knowledge, but, rather, new ways to access it. “Without sorting,” Flanders, a social historian and research fellow at the University of Buckingham, in England, writes, “all the knowledge in the world would lie in great unsifted stacks of books, themselves unfindable, unread and unknown.”
Her book tracks the rise of alphabetization in the several thousand years after the alphabet’s birth in the desert of Upper Egypt. At times, Flanders explains, “alphabetical order looked like resistance, even rebellion, against the order of divine creation. Or possibly ignorance: An author who placed angeli, angels, before deus, God, simply because A comes before D, was an author who had failed to comprehend the order of the universe.” (Eighteenth-century Harvard and Yale certainly understood the order of their universe, choosing to list students by their families’ wealth and social position.)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge derided the alphabetized Encyclopaedia Britannica as “a huge unconnected miscellany … in an arrangement determined by the accident of initial letters.” But an alphabetically ordered encyclopedia was truly modern, Flanders explains, indicating “a shift from seeing the world as a hierarchical, ordered place, explicable and comprehensible if only a person knew enough, to seeing it as a random series of events and people and places.” Alphabetical order’s neutrality became its best quality.
Exploring the organizational systems of works as varied as preachers’ guides, legal digests and commonplace books, Flanders also dives into the invention of index cards, roll-top desks and children’s reading primers. She considers biases Westerners have against languages that don’t rely on the Roman alphabet. During the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics, in Beijing, for example, American commentators had what Thomas Mullaney, a Stanford professor of Chinese history, called “a complete exegetical breakdown,” when teams paraded in the order of the traditional Chinese classification system. (Greece comes first in every Olympics; in Beijing, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Turkey came next.)
Flanders, a meticulous scholar who has written books on Victorian London and the history of Christmas, prioritizes thoroughness, and at times her book can read a bit like the encyclopedias she writes about. The footnotes get some of the best lines. (Who knew that the Dewey Decimal System was created by a racist anti-Semite who was asked to resign a librarianship for endorsing Christian whites-only clubs?)
Ultimately, “A Place for Everything” rewards us with a fresh take on our quest to stockpile knowledge. It feels particularly relevant now that search engines are rendering old ways of organizing information obsolete. (How do today’s Rob Flemings organize their Spotify playlists?) That we have acquired so much knowledge is astounding; that we have devised ways to find what we need to know quickly is what merits this original and impressive book. “We think,” Flanders writes, “therefore we sort.”
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