Alphabetical Order, Is It In The Eye Of The Beholder?

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To make things easier to find in lists, people use different ways to order the lists that they have. A lot of these ways vary between people but there are some set standards which a lot of people follow, for example 'a' to 'z' and 0 to 9. The way I would order a list in alphabetical order and a few questions I have outlines are shown below:

• #!%&: Creating Comic Books
• $35 a Day Through Europe
• .38 Special
• 1001 Arabian Nights
• Albany, New York
• El Paso, Texas
• H20: The Beauty of Water
• New York, New York
• Newark, New Jersey
• Plzen, Czech Republic
• Saint Nicholas, Belgium
• St. Louis, Missouri
• The 1-2-3 of Magic
• The Hague, Netherlands
• The Lord of the Rings
• XVIIme siècle

1. Did you put The Hague under T or H?  To keep things simple, I placed all of the words in alphabetical order based on the characters and not on preconceptions that certain words such as "the" or "a" should be ignored. The title "The Hague" has a first character, 'T" for "The" and therefore placed it as such.
2. Did you put El Paso under E or P? The word "El Paso" as with the above question, I took the same road and placed it based on the first character of the word, which is 'E' and placed it accordingly.
3. Which came first in your list, Newark or New York? The words "Newark" and "New York" were a bit tricky to start off with, but after careful consideration I decided to place "New York" first and then "Newark". The reason for this being is that I treated the space inside "New York" as a special character, which I believe should have precedence over letters.
4. Does St. Louis come before or after Saint Nicholas? In this list I have placed "Saint Nicholas" before "St. Louis" as 'a' comes before 't'.
5. How did you handle numbers, punctuation, and special characters? The way that I have decided to order things, was to put special characters, such as *&^%$, first, then would come punctuation, followed by numbers and finally finishing with letters.
6. Assuming the italicised terms are book titles, what might be a more useful way to organise this list? If we are having only one list, I believe this is still the best way to order them, but if we were able to use multiple lists. I believe it would be best to categorize the individual lists into groups such as books, locations and so forth.
7. If the cities represent places you’ve visited and the book titles are ones you’ve read, how could chronology be used to order the list in a more meaningful way? Chronology could be used in especially well with books, as you could place the series names in alphabetical order and then place them in chronological order to make it easier to see what books you have read already and what you haven't. Cities on the other hand, would be slightly more difficult to put into chronological order and thus I don't believe it would be a better way to order them.