If you look hard enough, you can find a book on any topic. There may even be a reserve queue at your local library. A Place For Everything's subtitle isn't quite accurate; it's more a history of information systems. Tracing the categorization of knowledge from the origins of writing (while pictographic systems developed in many places, alphabets appeared spontaneously in only three places). When people and ideas didn't travel, we didn't need a universal way to categorize information but with trade and technology, that changed. Scrolls became books (more compact and portable), bookkeeping became more complex, and the alphabet overtook categorization as the dominant way to organize lists. Flanders takes us from ancient crossroads (where trade was conducted in gestures and pictographs) through the internet (where searches and hypertext decrease the importance of alphabetical order), giving the origin stories for the card catalog and office furniture.
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