A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order

Today’s nonfiction post is on A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order by Judith Flanders. It is 352 pages long and is published by Basic Books. The cover is the alphabet done in an illuminated style. There is some mild foul language, no sex, and no violence in this book. The intended reader is someone who likes history and language arts. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket- A Place for Everything is the first-ever history of alphabetization, from the Library of Alexandria to Wikipedia. The story of alphabetical order has been shaped by some of history's most compelling characters, such as industrious and enthusiastic early adopter Samuel Pepys and dedicated alphabet champion Denis Diderot. But though even George Washington was a proponent, many others stuck to older forms of classification -- Yale listed its students by their family's social status until 1886. And yet, while the order of the alphabet now rules -- libraries, phone books, reference books, even the order of entry for the teams at the Olympic Games -- it has remained curiously invisible.
With abundant inquisitiveness and wry humor, historian Judith Flanders traces the triumph of alphabetical order and offers a compendium of Western knowledge, from A to Z. 

Review- An in depth and long reaching look into not just the use of alphabetical order but of many different things that we take for granted now. Flanders is a good historian, a good writer, and she can make big topics into something that will interest anyone and this book is no different. Flanders starts at the earliest written works and then moves into the present day. She discusses original ways that information was sorted by hierarchy from god all the way down to minerals. She gives the reasons for why alphabetical order was not the natural thing that we think it to be now but she shows how it became that natural order to us in the modern day. I have read other works from Flanders so I went into this book with high expectations and she wrote to them. I would recommend this book if you like the idea of the topic. 

I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.