“Writing is powerful because it transcends time,” she writes, “and because it creates an artificial memory, or store of knowledge, a memory that can be located physically, be it on clay tablets, on walls, on stone, on bronze, papyrus, parchment or paper.” Flanders introduces the Benedictine monks and their influential work in their monasteries, and after spending several chapters on the Middle Ages, she introduces the birth of printing as well as movable type and the first card catalogs. It might seem like a relatively dull subject, but the author’s prose is consistently engaging. Flanders moves from a discussion of language in the classical world all the way to the 21st century, with hypertext and other breakthroughs in language acquisition and absorption. The author creates a fitting structure for the book, proceeding from “A Is for Antiquity” to “Y Is for Y2K” (not every letter gets its own chapter). In her latest, social historian and novelist Flanders tackles the curious history of alphabetical order. The centurieslong history of the evolution of the alphabet as we know it.
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