“A Place For Everything” by Judith Flanders (2020)

“Writing, from its earliest days, has been thought of as a gift from the gods.”

My niche reading has previously included a book about handwriting, one on the history of the bookshelf, another on stationery … I love a niche book. Here, however, I might have outdone myself. This isn’t just a book on writing or the alphabet: this is a book about the history of cataloguing and how alphabetical order came to dominate the world.

Like many people, this was something I’d never really considered. From th...