A celebration of alphabetical order, from its humble beginnings to its pre-eminence as the organizing principle for the sum of the world's knowledge.
Judith Flanders is the author of the bestselling The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed (2003); A Circle of Sisters (2001), which was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award; the New York Times bestselling The Invention of Murder (2001), shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction; The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (2012), shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times History Book of the Year; The Making of Home (2014) and Christmas, A Biography (2017). In her copious leisure time, she also writes the Sam Clair series of comic crime novels.
Marvellous . . . I read it with astonished delight . . . It is
equally scholarly and entertaining.
*Jan Morris*
Quirky and compelling . . . She is a meticulous historian with a
taste for the offbeat; the story of the alphabet suits her well . .
. Fascinating.
*Sunday Times*
A library and academic essential.
*The Times*
One of the many fascinations of Judith Flanders’s book is that it
reveals what a weird, unlikely creation the alphabet is.
*Guardian*
Judith Flanders’s A Place for Everything presents itself as a
history of alphabetical order, but in fact it is 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 – a Collison –level view of the matter, in which
alphabetical order is just one system among many.’
*The Spectator*
Judith Flanders has a knack for making odd subjects accessible . .
. In A Place for Everything, the popular historian paints
alphabetisation as one of our most radical acts. . . Flanders
retains a sense of fun . . . finds contemporary resonance in
humanity's search for order.
*i*
Praise for Judith Flanders' previous book, Christmas: A Biography:
'A catalogue of colourful information, and as surprising an
assortment of items as any you might find heaped up under a
tree.'
*Observer*
A well-researched account. There are more footnotes here than there
are presents under a Rockefeller Christmas tree. Indeed, the book
is stuffed with facts – enough to satiate even the most ravenous
postprandial taste for quizzing.
*Sunday Times*
[An] entertaining biography . . . Following the fine tradition of
light entertainment Christmas books, Judith Flanders provides lots
of trivia . . . However, there is much more to it than that.
Flanders is a respected social historian, best known for studies on
Victorian life, and the strength of this warm book lies in its
quiet erudition.
*The Times*
Judith Flanders . . . likes Christmas (I think), but she loves
reality and its awkward, amusing facts. (A previous book of hers,
Inside the Victorian Home, is deep, bright and encompassing.)
*New York Times*
The non-fiction I most enjoyed . . . an excellent subject, carried
out with exemplary care and authority.
*Spectator*
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