Dave's book review for A Place For Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order

So, as the subtitle indicates, this book is about putting things in alphabetical order. And it is. But it’s also about so much more.

I knew it would be interesting but I didn’t know why it would be interesting. Most of us take putting things in alphabetical order for granted. But when you reall think about it, it actually takes a number of logical leaps to get from pictographic writing systems to completely abstract alphabets with no basis in pictures, and then put those symbols in a particular order (probably to memorize) and then to think of putting items (like scrolls or lists of names or books) in that order for later retrieval.

This covers so much ground. I would end up with an enormous page of text just trying to list the subjects. I’ll just say, if you’re interested in languages, writing systems, information storage, or history, you’re gonna love this.

I was especially interested in the large role given to commonplace books (wikipedia.org). The Wikipedia article gives a good summary, but I really did not understand how common they truly were, nor the degree to which students were expected to keep one. And I especially was not aware of the standardization of the subjects expected to be in a person’s commonplace book. But it explains so much.

As a personal connection, I thought it was extremely interesting to read that people would also use their commonplace books as a "capture system" into which all of their day-to-day notes would go, after which they would transcribe the notes into proper ledgers and record books for specific areas of knowledge or business. That’s remarkably similar to what I’ve ended up with my notebook system.

I learned about all sorts of interesting note-taking and glossary-making methods that people have devised over the years. I saw examples of nested marginalia written by scribes. I learned all kinds of things. So many.

This was really neat to read right after The Card Catalog. Where TCC was mostly focused on organizing books, A Place for Everything has a much wider scope. In fact, it even covered facts about organizing and cataloging with index cards that were not in TCC. Which is pretty impressive.

I highly recommend this book. It might drag in a few places, but just keep going because something interesting is just around the corner.