Talk about mastering the alphabet

I’ve finally finished reading Nausea by Albert Camus and it is suppose to be the diary of a M. Roquentin. The setting of the supposed diary is 1920’s France. In one of his entries, he wrote about an acquaintance the Self-Taught Man who he noticed reads books according to how the books are arranged on the shelves, alphabetically by the authors’ family name. The Self-Taught Man was already going through the "L" when this was noticed by the diarist.

It made me review my history of classification and cataloging. I know for certain that LC and DDC were developed in the 19^th century but can’t be sure of the years. I know too that before standard classification systems were developed there were many ways of shelving, storing and stacking library books, one of which is arranging the books alphabetically by author. Somehow an account of a library setting from the perspective of a library user rather than a formal historian is more appealing and oddly more believable.

But in my daily library functions, I can't say I've really mastered the alphabet. We are using the LC classification system and when arranging book cards or arranging books on the shelves I can't automatically say that PG comes first before PJ. I always seem to go back to basics and think G, H, I, J...