Judith Flanders is a social historian. Her works include the bestselling The Invention of Murder, Inside the Victorian Home, and The Victorian City. She is senior research fellow at the University of Buckingham, as well as a frequent contributor to the Sunday Telegraph, the Guardian, and the Wall Street Journal.
"A Place for Everything presents itself as a history of
alphabetical order, but in fact it is much more than that. Rather,
as the title suggests, it offers something like a general history
of the various ways humans have sorted and filed the world around
them."--The Spectator
"A charming repository of idiosyncrasy, a love letter to literacy
that rightly delights in alphabetisation's exceptions as much as
its rules."--Financial Times
"A library and academic essential rather than a catchpenny popular
read (that, by the way, is a compliment)."--The Times of London
"Fascinating . . . truly revelatory"--Wall Street Journal
"Fascinating... 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...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."--New
York Times
"Flanders is one of our outstanding popular historians.... [A Place
for Everything] is an exemplar of the form on which it
focuses."--The Critic
"For readers who love language or armchair historians interested in
the evolution of linguistics, this is catnip. For the mildly
curious, it's accessible, narratively adventurous, and surprisingly
insightful about how the alphabet marks us all in some way...A rich
cultural and linguistic history."--Kirkus
"Judith Flanders has a knack for making odd subjects
accessible."--i
"One of the many fascinations of Judith Flanders's book is that it
reveals what a weird, unlikely creation the alphabet is...an
intriguing history not just of alphabetical order but of the human
need for both pattern and intellectual efficiency."--Guardian
"Quirky and compelling... [Flanders] is a meticulous historian with
a taste for the offbeat; the story of alphabetical order suits her
well."-- Dan Jones, Sunday Times (UK)
"Surprising and copiously researched."--Times Literary
Supplement
"Flanders is especially good in discussing when and why
alphabetical order was not used, or was resisted, even after it was
available....The prose is engaging [and] the examples are to the
point[.]"
--Jack Lynch, Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of
North America
"This is an utterly charming book, packed with engrossing
details."--The Times (UK)
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