Now this was interesting and the history reading I never thought I needed and would totally enjoy.
Thanks Netgalley for the eARC.

I appreciate the publisher allowing me to read this book. A fascinating history of alphabetical order I could not put down. Highly recommend.

Thanks to Netgalley and Basic Books for a digital copy I read with the audio from my library.

I have mixed feelings about this one. I caused a little bit of a slump in my audiobook reading life, but I'm also so glad I read it. I didn't enjoy the reading experience per se because the content is a bit dry at times, but I know I will be thinking about this book for years. I love organization, I love alphabetization, and I was set up to love this book. And I did enjoy learning about how we as a society have advanced and how our organization systems have had to advance to keep up. It was fascinating to hear about the growth of libraries, education, and the written word. It was interesting to reflect on how society has shifted and how we will never know have affected our lives in such huge ways we don't realize by affecting how they are organized. If you are a huge word nerd or lover of libraries and organizations I think you will find this one interesting. My advice though: take it a chapter at a time.

As a former editor who worked with librarians (who one argued about whether a table of contents was supposed to be organized alphabetically letter by letter or word by word), A Place for Everything should be my kind of book. It details the history and background of alphabetization in significant thoroughness. It is academic and while interesting, this is not a quick read.

Thank you to Netgalley for an ARC. All opinions are my own.

I love alphabetizing everything that could be alphabetized, so this book was fascinating to me. It tells the history of how alphabetization came to be; how the order of letter was set and organized. Alphabetization, which started as an absurd and unthinkable concept, became common place and now it is in decline in the digital age. The author does a great job without being dense on the topic.

I am very much into the history of language, of words, and was intrigued to read this book. Factual, well-written and minutely researched it is a magnifying look into the history of how the alphabet, as we know it, came to be.
Definitely interesting, I would recommend to anyone who is really interesting in this kind of exhaustive study of a literary topic; as much as I wanted to love it wholeheartedly, parts of it felt so in-depth that I felt out of my depth, and I had to read it over a relatively long period of time to let myself process it all.
Enjoyable in a very specific way.

An interesting history of the organization of information - things I never even thought to wonder about, like how did alphabetical order come to be? It seems like such an obvious organization scheme but it hasn't always been. Lots of interesting footnotes and details.

Thank you to the publisher and #NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. I had never considered the evolution of the organizational methods and word tools I use everyday. Flanders’ examination of the alphabetic language, categorization, and overall goal of sorting in order to access knowledge was an engaging read that presented itself as a full college lecture course. The amount of historical data and research was impressive. I enjoyed the work once I released myself from all of the minutia and focused on the broad themes. For example, considering the abstract notions of glossaries, indexes, dictionaries, catalogues, and even time. Or pondering the evolutionary glimpses of libraries and search tools. But perhaps the realization of the concept of “paperwork,” and those who daily fight the good battle on both professional and personal battlegrounds, was shockingly relatable at every historical benchmark.

Book nerds, rejoice! Delighted to feature this title in the big annual Holiday Gift Books Guide (in print in the weekend edition Books section on November 28, 2020) in The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper.

When I was in high school, one of my favorite things to do was to come up with “unanswerable” questions. I thought they were unanswerable because no one had Google at their fingertips quite yet, and high schoolers’ internet searching skills were and still are truly hideous. One of those questions was “Which came first, the color ‘orange’ or the fruit ‘orange’? (It turns out the fruit was named first in English.) The other one, which is a little bit more unanswerable but I still never bothered to do an internet search for: “Why is the alphabet in the order that it is, and who decided it?” Well, that’s a big reason why I picked up Judith Flanders’ new book, A Place For Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order. As you can imagine if you think of how little sourcing there would be for such a historical query, that is not exactly what the book is about (although I did get an answer to that question in my interview with Flanders). However, the book is a wonderful example of great microhistory, following the development and use of alphabetical order over time and place.
You may be thinking, like me, that alphabetical order is pretty natural and doesn’t require a lot of development. It probably just happened naturally. But at some point, you had to learn how to put things (or find things) in alphabetical order, and it probably didn’t come very naturally at first. Most likely, someone taught you how it worked. Alphabetical order’s need for development becomes clear in an excerpt from Giovanni Balbi’s Catholicon (a compendium of grammar) where he explains in minute detail how Balbi uses alphabetical order. Flanders explains:
Balbi’s long explanation brings into focus the work that goes into dictionaries, which, when we use them, seem straightforward, as though the dictionary maker has simply had to perform a mechanical task: Ab before Ac, and so on. For while alphabetical order is the most useful tool to find a word in a dictionary that has so far been devised, it is by no means the easiest tool to create a dictionary. Grouping words by type (slang, or technical words, or fields of knowledge), or by entry size (words like “go” and “run,” which require lengthy definitions and have a large number of meanings), or grammatically (verbs, nouns, adjectives) are all far easier for the dictionary writer to implement. In addition, endless decisions are required to alphabetize usefully. Where do abbreviations get placed? — does DIY go under “di,” or under “do” for “do it yourself ’? What about compound or hyphenated words? Post / Postilion / Post office, or Post / Post office / Postilion? What about words that have no letters, like 9/11? What happens to words with accents? Are those letters treated as though there is no accent, or are they ordered as though the accented letter is a separate entity? Alphabetization is easier to use than to produce, as Balbi’s explanation made clear.
In other portions of the book, Flanders also notes that absolute alphabetical order was not exclusively used until relatively recently, meaning that putting “Nesbitt” before “Nathan” would be just as correct as vice versa. It’s only later that there is a correct way to order “Nash” and “Nathan”, much less “Nat”, “Nathan” and “Nathaniel”.
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Most of Flanders’ published work explores the Victorian era, so it is impressive that she delves deep into almost 5000 years of history all over the world with seeming ease. She even refuses to make the ultra-common mistake of starting the story of the development of printing with Johannes Gutenberg, choosing instead to trace the origins of movable type in China through its spread and modification in Korea before Gutenberg stole ideas from about fifteen different people to develop the movable type printing press. It’s details like this that give me confidence in a historian’s process, and Flanders exhibits fitness for that confidence throughout the book.
Alphabetical order, like any technology, had its detractors. Devotees to various faiths considered it a vice and a shortcut to the more meaningful memorization of locations and even ideas. Flanders relays a get-off-my-lawn-style rant against “kids these days” who used alphabetization:
The barrister Abraham Fraunce (c. 1559 — c. 1592/3), whose greater fame was as a poet under the patronage of Philip Sidney, trumpeted his discontent in an I-had-to-learn-the-hard-way-so-you-youngsters-should-too outburst: “I could heartily wish the whole body of our law to be rather logically ordered, than by alphabetical breviaries torn and dismembered. If any man say it cannot be . . . then I do not so much envy his great wisdom, as pity his rustical education, who had rather eat acorns with hogs, than breed [bread] with men, and prefer the loathsome tossing of an A.B.C. abridgement, before the lightsome perusing of a methodical coherence of the whole common law.”
In other ways, however, the use of alphabetical order does legitimately mark “a transition in worldview”. That seems so silly to say of what seems to most a benign innovation, but by the time you reach this point in A Place For Everything, you will see that alphabetization is not a neutral conduit. Flanders writes:
Just as the spread of alphabetically organized dictionaries and indexes had indicated a shift from seeing words purely as meaning to seeing them as a series of letters, so too the arrival of alphabetically ordered encyclopedias indicated 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.
You may, like me, find that change in worldview nauseating. I would hate for my students to think world history is a “random series of events and people and places”. I would rather my students see it as “explicable and comprehensible if only a person knew enough”. But then again, that’s why I don’t arrange my world history class in alphabetical order. Doing so would be silly. And that’s where Flanders is spot on in her evaluation of the merits or demerits of alphabetization:
Alphabetical order is a means, not an end in itself. It is a system that permits us to organize large quantities of information, and to make it available to others whom we do not know, and who have no information regarding the people or ideas or intentions of those who originally produced and arranged it. There continue to be many ways of organizing, storing, and retrieving information, sometimes in the same way it originated, sometimes in a way that transforms it. Linnaeus’s taxonomy, and the periodic tables, are naming and classifying systems. The Dewey decimal system classifies, but does not name. Most museum exhibits are organizing, classifying, and displaying systems. Maps are displaying and also transforming systems, as are graphs and pie and bar charts. The importance is not the method, but a method, any method. “The human mind works by internalizing such arbitrary and useful tools, as a kind of grid onto which knowledge can be arranged, and from which it can be retrieved,” wrote the novelist A. S. Byatt. We think, therefore we sort.
In any sorting decision, there are going to be better and worse means of ordering. Some social scientists have provided evidence that the alphabetization of student names is discriminatory. In some cases, like a dictionary or encyclopedia, it may be the proper sorting technique. The key is to find a sorting means that helps you meet your ends. (You didn’t think a review of a book about alphabetical order could get this serious, did you?)
Flanders’ A Place For Everything is skilled in its job of telling a unique history through a means that is both interesting and historically sound. If such quirks of history enrapture you, I would heartily recommend this book. And if you haven’t already, check out my interview with Judith Flanders for more about how she came to the topic, the process of writing history, and more.
I received a review copy of A Place For Everything courtesy of Basic Books and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.

In probably the most boring thing I've ever done, I've now read a whole book on the history of alphabetical order. Except I don't think it's boring. The rest of the world may, but I think it's fascinating. I love organising things - particularly data. I work in a museum archive. My Goodreads shelves are a thing of genius. I create spreadsheets for fun and used to make Powerpoint presentations on my favourite animals and places I wanted to visit as a kid. So when I say this book was written exclusively for me, I say it with very little exaggeration.

The research in this book is a thing of beauty. In fact, it's so beautiful, it's a bit unapproachable, like a museum artifact behind plexiglass. By far the most interesting, and the most accessible, chapters are the first few, as well as the last one. The rest in between can be a bit slow at times, and even I had droopy eyelids during 'F is for Firsts'. This isn't really the author's fault, however, but rather a lull in history in the progression of how people chose to organise their own book collections. There are still bits in those chapters that are interesting, largely revolving around the fact that standardization didn't even exist as a concept, and every single person and their institution had their own order in which they thought things to be most important. The first few chapters, the ones I think the general public, and not keener historians like me, would find the most interest in, talk a lot about why alphabetisation didn't even have a need to exist, because information didn't need to be ordered. As in, there was so little of it that people just simply memorised it. The Benedictine monks were expected to know each and every book in their library, where it was located, and what information was in it. Why does an index need to exist when you already know where everything is? I also thought it was really interesting to learn that alphabetisation was considered a subpar, blasphemous way of suggesting that one was simply too stupid to organise things any other way. Throughout my history degree I tended to lean towards learning about how religion (particularly Christianity) had shaped and formed the world as it developed, and the same goes for the organisation of information and how to access it. Hierarchical systems were paramount, with everything related to God coming first, and then slowly down the pecking order things were placed in relation. Deus was always listed before angel, despite D coming later in the alphabet than A, because God was above all things. The alphabet did exist of course, and did in fact have a specific order, but was not used as a method of ordering things and the idea that it could be the most useful was out of the question. The only places that had enough material to even need organising were monasteries or other religious institutions, and of course they would use the hierarchical system with God as the highest.

Anyone who has a knack for it or takes pleasure in organising and making things as efficient as possible will appreciate this book. However as I mentioned, it does get into nitty gritty detail, and let’s face it, everything with a history will inevitably have slow points. But I think it does prove to be incredibly interesting, and even if you didn’t have any interest at all, I’m sure you would be fascinated (or at least humoured) to know how begrudgingly stubborn humans have remained throughout history. As a species, we just do not like change. Even when it comes to the alphabet, something we all take for granted. We also don’t realise how even alphabetical order, something that is the most neutral way of organising things, still isn’t completely unbiased. What about all those languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet or use other non-alphabetic writing forms? They are forced to adapt and mold their cultures, much older and lengthy than most of ours, which hardly seems fair.

I have a lot more passages and paragraphs highlighted that I would love to share, but I am aware that not nearly as many people as I’d like would find that as interesting as I do. I’m in enough danger in turning this into a term paper as it is. In summary, if you find this topic interesting but not quite interesting enough to read how specific people ordered their books in the 15th century, definitely skim the first few chapters as well as the last one, which jumps to the 21st century and our own modern ways of organisation (and the subsequent downgrade of alphabetic order as even really that necessary when information can be received nearly instantly rather than having to search for it). For the rest of us nerds who crave this kind of order, this is exactly what we wanted. You’re welcome.

2 stars
A Place for Everything
The Curious History of Alphabetical Order
By Judith Flanders
I was very excited to read this book. I am a word nerd and love everything to do with words, books etc, and the history behind them.
While the concept for this book is amazing, the delivery is slow, dry and plodding. I could not finish it.
There may be an audience for this book, it is not me.
I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher and NetGalley. The views given are my own.

This is a fascinating concept for a book at its core, but when you linger on the topic for overlong, you realize that it would be incredibly difficult to actually write about. That is the major difficulty with this book, trying to confer conceptual stratification without being able to know if the ideas are landing with your audience. It's a hard thing to do, and the author manages well enough for the most part. The emphasis and passion for the topic is there, but it never grows into a strong core idea that could survive on its own.

I love Flanders books, so I was really excited to see this one available to read now. Thank you for the opportunity to read this book! I have seen it around and put it on my TBR but never got the chance to read it.

I like this book because it has a cool unique purpose. Flanders has always been one of my favored historical authors because their writing style is accessible and doesn’t bore me!

I was unable to finish this book. I gave it 10 percent before I gave up. It was dry and technical while also being wishy washy because so much of the early information on writing is guesswork. I found the topic interesting but the writing style just didn't do it for me.

I was so excited about this book when I saw that it was available -- I have been working in bookstores and libraries since I was a teenager, so classification and organization of information is a big deal to me. There's really nothing that relaxes me more than putting a list in order. I was primed to love this book, but I merely liked it. Most of the book discusses what happened in the ancient world, Middle Ages, and the era right after movable type and printing presses came into existence. (95% dead white men, in other words.) The author's style is academic, and a full 30% of the page count was notes and bibliography. This book would be very useful for someone who is writing a paper for library school. I make it sound like it's not interesting, but I learned so much. (For example, Melvil Dewey was a creep to a criminal degree!) I think this book is probably much better when it's not the advance copy, too, because in the digital ARC, there is no delineation between notes and text boxes vs. the main body of the text, so it got very confusing. I think there are more illustrations in the published book, too. This would make a perfect gift for someone who loves history, research, and archives.

First of all, allow me to appreciate the author, publishing, and Netgalley teams for giving an opportunity to review this amazing work, extremely complex and systemized research, breath-taking piece of non-fiction literature.
"A place for everything" masterfully presents the history, idea, and the logic of the bone of our languages, the alphabet. We learn it as a child, it is the base of our lingo-cognitive function, it is the key of passing knowledge through millennia, pass our feelings, read, write, communicate...
We are not taught the logic of alphabet construction, we normally do not analyze why a certain letter stands where it stands and how possibly it determines our cognitive functions, but there is a logic, a very stellar one, centuries on experience and the very basic logic of our brain functions are determining the alphabet construct, which itself determines our cognitive functions...
it is the ultimate and infinite process of our mass cognition influencing the alphabet construct which influences the individual cognition...
I love this book, it is a masterpiece. without a doubt, a five-star read, more than that...
so lyrical and systematic and complex.
Read it, just for erudition and appreciate the system, we as humankind created, for the progress of humankind...

Please share a physical copy with me if possible, I'd love to treasure the work in my library and spread this knowledge with people, I sincerely appreciate this work.

Fascinating subject, but the book itself it much too difficult to get through. The writing style not quite engaging enough and too footnotes happy. Tons of good information, but more of a textbook than a fun educational read.

An astonishing amount of research has gone into this book and it’s an exhaustive – and unfortunately rather exhausting -exploration of how we learnt to order and classify things, and how although alphabetical order seems so intuitive to us now, something we just take for granted, it wasn’t always thus. As a librarian, order and classification are dear to my heart and I enjoyed much of this book. But there is so much of it to enjoy and after a while I began to feel a bit shell-shocked by all the information I was trying to process. I’m not sure how the author could have made the book any more digestible, but I rather wish she had.

Read if you: Enjoy deep dives in arcane topics such as catalogs, classifications, and the like..

I really, really wanted to enjoy this more than I did. I was not the right reader for this book; it was much more "in the weeds" for its intended topic than I anticipated. I found the later part of the book the most interesting section (Dewey classification--and I appreciated the discussion of its significant shortcomings--and phone books!).

Many thanks to Perseus Books/Basic Books and NetGalley for a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.