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A Niche but Rewarding Read

I'll be completely honest: I picked up Judith Flanders's new book from the shelves of Barnes & Noble because of its enticing cover with no real idea of what to expect. It turned out to be a tremendously well-researched work that dives into a specific aspect of the literary world that I had never seen before— a blend of alphabetization, categorization, and digitization in a rapid and sometimes overwhelming book. Here's a quick review.

If you're looking for a medium-sized book with an immense and rich bibliography to serve your literary needs in addition to some fascinating, specialized research, A Place for Everything is the perfect book for you. Right from the start, I'll address its major downfall since I feel like it needs to be addressed early on: it goes a bit too fast. Jumping from historical figure to the next, Flanders compresses an enormous amount of history into a short read which left me juggling an enormous amount of writers, librarians, theologians, critics, and politicians. Though this is true, this book is absolutely not meant to be read in a few sittings— it is certainly more of a reference book which can inform your research and curiosity if you want to return to the intriguing ideas which Flanders raises.

A Place for Everything is divided into neat chapters with titles like "A is for Alphabetization" and "Y is for Y2K" that sometimes spill into one another but focus on a central tenet of organization behind books and documents. Along the way, there are a variety of images to reference as well as an insert for you to visualize the technologies which Flanders refers to. In particular, she looks at how ancient civilizations that used visual representations like the hieroglyphs slowly molded into recognizable symbols as we know them in the West before explaining how we have organized books since then. One main overarching message in her work is that alphabetization is actually a recent phenomenon— it almost took until the 20th century to use it systematically without apology or explanation. It's a process that seems so automatic now that there is very little research about it.

Flanders traces the development of different ordering methods and how critics reacted to them, such as the change from religious categorization (starting encyclopedias with God, followed by angels since the Bible was structured in this way) to a hierarchy based on disciplines. She brings up examples of ordering based on social status, the order that people joined a particular group, or the reputation of a particular subject (philosophy before natural history). And, in doing so, she discusses revolutionary changes and influential works like Diderot's Encyclopedie and Dewey's decimal system, which has a disturbing backstory.

The final two pages of Flanders's book end immaculately. She makes you really understand why she undertook this research, employing quotations to strengthen her philosophical argument. The introduction and conclusion together tied up the work quite strongly and made me feel like the read was well worth it.

I would rate A Place for Everything a 7.5/10, with points being deducted for the occasional acceleration in her tone which sometimes overwhelms the reader with too much information at once. However, I can guarantee that you will enjoy this book if you are a humanities scholar who is looking to invest some time in some very specific research that is quite difficult to find in any other book in all honesty. And seriously, the cover art is an absolute must-have, go see for yourself!


4/15/21


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