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Books

How to organise everything — Judith Flanders’s history of finding things

1 February 2020

9:00 AM

1 February 2020

9:00 AM

A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order Judith Flanders

Picador, pp.345, £16.99

In the middle of the last century, Robert Collison, one of the founders of the Society of Indexers, addressed himself to the question of what, exactly, an index is. In Collison’s loosest formulation, every time we organise the world around us so that we know where to find things, we are in fact indexing.

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