Interview: Judith Flanders on the History of Alphabetical Order
By: Jason Park
Tags: History Of Technology, Books, Reading, Interview, History

Park & Recommendations: Ms. Flanders, thank you for your time in answering my questions. I am an AP World History teacher in my day job, so your book grabbed my attention and I have very much enjoyed reading it.

This book is the epitome of a micro-history, a genre I always enjoy because of how specific and even quirky they can be. What led you to decide to write about the history of alphabetical order?

Judith Flanders (historian, journalist, author): I came to this subject in a very sideways fashion. I read a review of a book on changes that had come with online reference works — it might have been a book about Wikipedia, but I don’t remember — and in passing, it mentioned that Wikipedia was the first encyclopaedia not to be in alphabetical order. (Spoiler alert: this is wrong by about a millennium.) I thought that was mildly interesting, but nothing more. Then a few months later, I went to see an exhibition of the artist Joseph Cornell, and I realized that his boxes were about classifying and sorting — in his case, putting things that *didn’t* belong together side by side. And I remembered that sentence from the book review and began to think about sorting and classifying. And from that, I ended up writing a book…

P&R: Was there a turning point where you realized you had made something important and interesting?

JF: I think I feel classifying my work as ‘important’ would be hubristic. On the other hand, ‘interesting’ is a word I’ll cling to. My feeling is, if I’m interested, so will other people be. My editor once joked (at least, I think it was a joke) that all my books could have the subtitle ‘Fun Stuff I Have Found Out’, and up to a point, that’s not untrue. I feel that historical movies, and television, and video games have made it all too easy for us to think that life in the past was exactly like ours, except with different clothes. And what I want to do is show how different it was, and because it was different, how people thought, and acted, differently. So the fact that in the Middle Ages, encyclopaedias were hierarchical rather than alphabetical wasn’t because, necessarily, the writers didn’t know about alphabetical order, but because they wanted to mirror the order of God’s creation — that was what mattered. And if we understand that, we understand something about the times they lived in.

P&R: Most of your work focuses on the Victorian era. Was it difficult to broaden your scope and write about almost five thousand years of history?

JF: Yes, it was really hard, and I still feel very hesitant, knowing full well that in every paragraph there are probably over-simplifications, or poor interpretations, or even outright errors that historians of the period would not have made. But at the same time, I do feel as a generalist, I sometimes see things that specialists overlook, because they’re so close to the subject. I’ve been amazed by the number of books, for example, on the history of lexicography that simply never mention, or gloss over, the choice of alphabetical order as an organizing principle — they assume that because that’s the way their dictionary or encyclopaedia is organized, that’s in some way ’natural’, and ‘had’ to happen that way.

P&R: I was especially interested in your book because in high school I had the recurring thought: “Why are the letters of the alphabet in the order that they are? Who decided the order?” Your book partially answered my question, because experts assume the letters were put in order to ease in memorization. Were you able to get any sense of who made the decision of how to order the alphabet, or what caused them to choose the order they did?

JF: Well, the answer is a) we don’t know why the letters of the alphabet are in the order they are; and b) almost certainly, no one decided the order. We do know that the order that has come down to us, that our English alphabet mostly follows, was set very early on. There is a carving — a graffito, really — in Lachish, from the late 9th or early 8th c. BCE, with the first five letters of the alphabet, in the order we know them. As you say, it was most likely in a set order to enable memorisation, but more than that we just don’t know.

P&R: Religion plays an important part in your book, but sometimes they facilitated the development of alphabetical order (like the early Hebrews, for memorization), but sometimes you mention that religions shunned alphabetical order because they believed real scholars should already know where things are. On the whole, do you think major religions facilitated the use of alphabetical order as an organization tool, or did they more often resist its use?

JF: Well, religion faces two ways when it comes to using alphabetic order. As I said, early encyclopaedias didn’t use alphabetic order, but instead a hierarchical order (God, then the saints, then angels, then man, then animals, then vegetation, minerals and so on). Using this order showed that you understood God’s plan for the universe, and not using it meant you were foolish and didn’t understand. Then, as you say, religions also relied hugely on memorisation — a scholar simply knew large tracts of the holy works by heart, and at most, what was written down was a prompt, not the, as it were, external memory of the scholar. But equally, it tended to be the religious institutions that provided education, and therefore the very core of alphabetic order — the alphabet — was taught by clerics. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the west, these clerics were actively using alphabetic order in books in order to be able to look up — an entirely new concept — biblical references or scholarly commentary.

P&R: I was stunned by the depth of research in A Place For Everything. What does your research process look like? (Do you hole up in a library somewhere in Europe? An archive? Do you get lost in a rabbit trail of documents sometimes? How do you organize your notes and findings?)

JF: I do mostly hole up in a library for a year or so, and just read everything I can get my hands on. Mostly I use the British Library, which is wonderful — you can order ten books a day and they just arrive, no scrambling around in dusty stacks to find them. But of course in these COVID days, libraries are more or less a lost paradise, and so like everyone else, I’m working more with online materials.

P&R: Where do you think the future lies for alphabetical order? Do you believe it is here to stay, or are digitization and search engines going to make alphabetization obsolete?

JF: I suspect it will survive, at least for a while (I’m using ‘a while’ in a sweeping historical fashion, meaning another century or so). Even Wikipedia, which we don’t think of as needing alphabetical order, uses it. If I look up the surname ‘Park’ on Wikipedia, it offers me a choice of Alex, Arlo, Bert, Bobby, Chan Ho, Christopher, Craig, Dan…. And we continue to expect alphabetical order in everyday life: student registers are almost all certainly alphabetical by surname; in a bookshop, Jane Eyre is almost equally certainly not shelved next to War and Peace. But yes, libraries no longer need to worry about whether it’s Tchaikovsky, or Tchaikovskii, or Chaikovskii, and how many readers will use each of those to try and find a biography of the composer. I remember when I was a student using the (then) bound volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography, and being bewildered when I couldn’t find an entry for George Eliot, not realising that the Victorian editors had placed her under ‘C’, for Cross, her (briefly) married name. Now, as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, it doesn’t matter what she’s called: as George Eliot, or Mary Ann (or Marian or Mary Anne) Evans, or Cross, or Lewes, she’ll come up whatever you key in, and that’s a liberation.

Thanks to Judith Flanders for this wonderful interview. If you have additional or follow-up questions, respond below or read A Place For Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order. It releases everywhere on October 20th.