By 13th century

This paragraph caught my eye.  It is from the book A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders

By the 13th century, knowing how to search through a book for a particular piece of information, rather than reading it from start to finish, had become commonplace for clergy and scholars. How to search for a book, however, was something that had yet to be addressed. Until this date, it had been a question that had barely needed a solution.

"A place for everything" p. 133 by Judith Flanders

"A Place for Everything" is subtitled "a history of alphabetical order".  You might think that such a history would be boring.  But I am married to a professor of school librarianship and I am a former library page, a lowly employee that replaces books that have been left out back where they belong.  It was from this book that I learned that

Your best hope for finding a particular book at one time was to ask the librarian where to find it.

It took years to move from arranging books by the first letter of their last name to also using the 2nd letter, so that "Kaplan" came before "Kirby".