I have read that Walter Ong, a Jesuit and a professor of literature, tracked the change in human life that resulted from the introduction of writing. Speech came first and I guess by eons but writing is indeed a different game. If you stay alert for comments like "Can I get that in writing?", you can see that writing tends to freeze language in a way that speech often can't. If you want, track down the book How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson and look at the chapter on sound. Yes, now we can record voices but that is a fairly recent possibility.
For many activities, it helps people to have a written version of what is said, even if it is available in a sound recording. It helps in comprehension, in examination and criticism and we can often read at twice the speed that we can listen and understand speech.
I read in Walter Ong somewhere that the tool of the index took a while to develop. Somebody got the idea to list important words in a document and the page number where those words were found. Ong reports that the invention was not always understood and that in the days of handwritten copies of handwritten documents, there is a case or two of the scribe copying the index while disregarding the fact that the copy he was creating had different page numbers owing to more compact or less compact handwriting. Coping the index as written made little sense.
Today, with search windows, it may be unnecessary to make an index although I think Microsoft Word can make one if you want it.
I admire the book "A Place for Everything" by Judith Flanders. It is subtitled "A History of Alphabetical Order". What the heck does that mean? I envisioned arguments that urged we start with some other letter than A and arguments against that idea. But no, the book is about using alphabetical order for shelved books and filed folders. Flanders explains that at one time, in some places, books were to be shelved in order of their importance to God. She writes that a librarian who placed angels before God simply failed to grasp the order of the universe.
She explains that it took a long while before anyone got the idea of arranging books all written by the authors whose name begins with M according to the second letter of their name.
