Historian Judith Flanders's book explores how the alphabet has organized the world around us: blending academic research with engaging fiction, it explores the ways in which we organize our understanding of reality using various symbolic systems, all connected in one way or another to the alphabet. The reader will embark on a true journey from the origins of human civilization to the 21st century, discovering how, thanks to figures like Samuel Pepys and Denis Diderot, the ability to capture information and systematize accumulated knowledge was shaped by the ordering of the letters of human writing.

The book's title reflects the author's versatility: it offers an excursion into the history of linguistics, a study of the origins of catalogs, and an overview of the history of book publishing from the Library of Alexandria to Wikipedia. In short, before you, without exaggeration, is a treasure trove of knowledge from A to Z (or from A to Z).

Author: Judith Flanders
Year: 2023
Number of pages: 342
Cover type: hardback