This weekend I finished the intriguing The Grid Book by Hannah Higgins. This Univ of Illinois at Chicago art historian interprets human cultural history through the lens of ten grids, from bricks and city layouts to type, boxes and networks including of course the internet. She demonstrates pretty convincingly I think the utility of the grid as an organising principle for human society, the more complex it becomes. The writing style is flawed by the baroque flourishes of cultural theory, although it is at least blessedly free of hermeneutics-type jargon. Still, that's greatly outweighed by the unexpected connections you get from applying the same perspective to such a wide range of activities.

The most interesting chapters to me covered the ledger, the box and the network. In each of these, economists will be familiar with the background material, be it the history of double entry book-keeping or the history of containerisation in Marc Levinson's terrific book The Box (taken up by the BBC in its tracking of a single shipping container around the world). The interest lies in the connections the author makes between this familiar ground and other territory, the arts and society. And there's an afterword which speculates about whether we're moving on from the grid to a mode of organisation based on fractals. Good stuff.