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Historically, power played an outsized role in the arrangement of listable items for centuries that power reflected prevailing religious norms. Still, alphabetical order is far more neutral than other systems. (Nicola Barker’s novel Darkmans – itself the size of a phone book – has a character enraged by a competitor whose company name pips him in the listings.) Many of them, moreover, game the system, bypassing its seeming neutrality. A traditional phone book does not quite go from A to Z – businesses are listed separately. It also often shares space with other kinds of order, such as genre, or personal cosmology. Alphabetical order is not the uniform ideal it may superficially seem to be. Yet it is less straightforward than is often supposed: my efforts to catalogue my books and DVDs, not to mention the bibliographies that I proofread, point to myriad complications. Alphabetical order is all around us, to various degrees of prominence.
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