Addresses and alphabetical order

If I just think about writing a book about addresses or one about alphabetical order, I think they might not be rich enough subjects to support a whole book.  Yet, we have enjoyed "The Address Book"by Deirdre Mask and "A Place for Everything" by Judith Flanders.

Mask invites the reader to think about life in a city without addresses.  A person might explain "I live near the beech tree".  She makes clear there are good-sized cities in the world that don't have a system of addresses.  The street we live on was evidently begun with one address system from one urban authority and then furnished with addresses by a different government. The result is a puzzling gap in the house numbers.  

Flanders has written several books about life in the Victorian era.  She is an expert on the subject.  Lynn was a professor of school librarianship, you know those school rooms that have been the subject of controversy since they can furnish children with books that introduce subjects that some parents don't want their children to know about.  I read that large libraries have existed that had basically no system for placing the books in some order.  An author said about such libraries that a patron's best hope was to ask a librarian where a given book might be.  

Physically small books might be stored together or maybe all the books with blue covers together.  Flanders says that it was centuries before someone suggested using the 2nd or later letters of an author's name after storing all the books by an author whose name began with R.