Q&A with with Judith Flanders, author of ‘A Place for Everything’

Alphabetical order may seem an inevitable way to organize the world. But things weren’t always like this – and indeed, might not be forever.

Alphabetical order may seem an inevitable way to organize the world, as natural as A before B. But we weren’t destined to sort things in this familiar way. So writes British historian Judith Flanders in her book, “A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order.” She spoke with Monitor correspondent Randy Dotinga. 

Q: What are other ways that humans could have ordered things?

We still use many today, but they are all strangely invisible. When schools organize their students by classes, they are using chronology, or age (grades) first, then alphabetical order. Bookshops divide up their books by subject first: fiction/nonfiction, then history, travel, etc., and only then alphabetically. You can file chronologically: If you just pile papers in a basket, the oldest will be at the bottom. Or historically, records were frequently kept hierarchically, with the most important people or things at the beginning.

Q: How did alphabetical order become the standard?

The key element to the success of alphabetical order is that ... the searcher doesn’t need any preliminary knowledge. 

If you were using geographical order, say, to list all the states, west to east, or north to south, you’d either have to go through almost every state before you got to Florida or you’d have to have a pretty good idea of where it was to begin with. With alphabetical order, all you need to know is it begins with “f.”

Q: What did you discover in your research that you found noteworthy?

One great organizing system was in medical books and called, in Latin, a capite ad calcem – from head to heels. Instead of organizing illnesses alphabetically, or by subject, they were organized in the order of the body. Headaches and toothache came at the start, while problems with your feet were at the end.

I also became fascinated by the cataloging method of Robert Cotton, one of the greatest manuscript collectors of the 17th century. He organized his library catalog by the names of the busts of rulers from antiquity that sat on each of his bookshelves. His collection was later incorporated into the British Library. Today, the manuscript of “Beowulf” is still cataloged as “Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv.” With the click of a mouse, we can learn that this manuscript was once the 15th (“xv”) book on the top shelf (“A”) of a bookcase surmounted by a bust of the Roman Emperor Vitellius.

Q: Has writing the book changed the way you look at order yourself?

Organizationally, I’m probably like the great 17th-century scientist Robert Boyle, who spent decades trying to devise systems to help him find things: He used different colored strings to tie up documents on different subjects, he kept endless lists to help him find things, he used different colored folders and markers and boxes, and he even wrote little mnemonic verses to remember the order certain papers were in. I haven’t tried that one yet.

That, of course, is the joy of filing things no one else needs to use – you can use any order that makes sense to you. In fact, one of the few systems Boyle didn’t use was alphabetical order. 

Q: Will alphabetical order be with us forever?

If we think about alphabetical order at all – and we rarely do – we think of it as if it were a sort of alphabetical Stonehenge: something that has always, and will always, exist. With increasing online hyperlinks and search functions, I suspect that in the next half-century or so, we may have to explain it again. And alphabetical order, instead of being eternal, will simply have turned out to be a historical quirk – an eight-century-long quirk, true, but a quirk nonetheless.