This TED-ED video talks about some of the most basic sorting methods (bubble sort, insertion sort and quick sort,) in response to a scenario where a librarian ends up with a stack of 1,280 unsorted books, and must quickly sort them into alphabetical order.
A number of commenters pointed out that a far more practical method for real-life sorting would be to take the first letter of each book and put it into 26 different piles (an A pile, a B pile, down to a Z pile.) Then use a conventional sorting method (insertion / quick sort etc.) for each of the 26 sub-piles (which would contain around 50 books each, assuming a roughly even distribution of letters. Or you could repeat the same process if the sub-pile is significantly large, sorting the As into ABs, ACs, ADs and so on.
Is there a name of this kind of sorting algorithm?