Judith Flanders: A Place For Everything
The Book Club
English - February 17, 2021 18:33 - 42 minutes - 39.4 MB - ★★★★★ - 37 ratingsBooks Arts politics culture news comedy health entrepreneur business entrepreneurship leadership interview Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Previous Episode: Toby Ord: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
Next Episode: Cat Jarman: River Kings
My guest in this week’s books podcast is the historian Judith Flanders, whose A Place For Everything tells the story of a vital but little considered part of intellectual history: alphabetical order. Judith tells me how this innovation both reflected and enabled the movement from oral to written culture, from a dogmatic to a secular worldview, and made possible the modern administrative state. And we touch on, among other things, prototypes of the Post-It note, the contribution of the French Revolution to indexing, the bizarre British Library shelfmark for Gawain and the Green Knight, and why Dewey, of decimal fame, was an utter rotter.