Alphabetic Order (under contract with Harvard University Press) is a groundbreaking study of the history and significance of writing media in Rome and its provinces. Beginning with the earliest inscriptions on ceramic surviving from pre-Roman Italy and continuing beyond the burial of the Herculaneum library by the eruption of Vesuvius, it demonstrates the extent to which writing was—and is—caught up in the physical. Far from being an empty vehicle for transmitting information from author to reader, writing in the ancient world was utterly embodied, and the shapes it took in turn deeply transformed the ways in which the people of ancient Italy and Rome thought about the world in which they lived. This is the first book-length study of the Roman alphabet and the social practices that developed around it, and it joins a growing body of research on the critical roles of reading and writing in the premodern world.