A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order by Judith Flanders (review)

A Place for Everything advertises itself as a history of alphabetical order, but that's not strictly true. Alphabetical order is a historian's nightmare: we have no evidence about where it came from. We learn our ABCs because the Romans learned their ABCs because the Greeks learned their ABΓs because the Phoenicians learned their ālep-bēt-gīmls because the Northern Canaanites learned whatever they learned—and why they learned it that way, nobody knows. As far back as our evidence takes us, the letters had an order. In the Hebrew Bible, for instance, Psalms 9 and 10 form an alphabetical acrostic, with pairs of lines beginning with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet: the first two verses start with aleph, the next two with beth, and so on. And as the alphabet was adapted for use in languages as diverse as Aramaic, Greek, Icelandic, Russian, Coptic, and Finnish, its order stayed remarkably consistent. Yet virtually no one seems to have made any use of that order for millennia. When asked why there was any order at all, we fall back on the faute-de-mieux explanation that the order was simply a mnemonic for learning the complete roster of letters.

If A Place for Everything isn't a book about the order of the alphabet, what is it? In fact it's a book about managing information more generally, and particularly the ways the alphabet has made that possible. But it was a long struggle. Flanders is especially good in discussing when and why alphabetical order was not used, or was resisted, even after it was available. Why is the Domesday Book, for instance, a list of 13,418 places, organized "first by status, then by geography, then by status again, and finally by wealth" (xxi-xxii)? What could motivate anyone to use such a nightmare of complexity when the alphabet was just waiting to be used? Flanders makes the case that the alphabet implies an ideology that many found disturbing.

The greatest virtue of alphabetical order is that it is entirely arbitrary: there is nothing intrinsic to abacuses or zygotes that keeps them thousands of pages apart. But the greatest vice of alphabetical order is also that it is entirely arbitrary: things are near or far from one another for no intrinsic reasons. For many people it violated good sense that father, mother, son, daughter, parent, and child should be scattered all over the dictionary while strand, stranger, strangle, strap, and stratagem are huddled together on the same page. Even worse, the alphabet's arbitrariness wrecks hierarchies by forcing the greatest to jostle together with the least. The thought that the Supreme Being should lodge between go-cart and Godzilla, while the lowly aardvark takes pride of place on page one, was more than many could tolerate. As Flanders puts it,

God had created a hierarchical world, and those who followed him reflected that hierarchy in their work. 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.

(33)

Why, then, did we change our minds and eventually come over to alphabetical order? The question has no single answer, and Flanders does not pretend it does, but she outlines many factors that may have contributed to its adoption. The Middle Ages saw the rapid growth of libraries, and print would only accelerate the trend, as people had to shift from intensive reading of a few texts to the extensive consulting of many. The growing sophistication of civil and ecclesiastical authorities also played a part: when governments and churches decided to keep records of every citizen, every soldier, every cleric, every student, every tax payment, every municipal regulation, every road, every shop...