library style pagination

[Ian Evans]

Was looking at a better way to handle the display of all the bios we publish and began thinking about library or alphabetical pagination, e.g.

Aardvark-Albert, Albertson-Anders, Anderson-Atwell

I realize that a lot of this is to be handled by the scripting language (PHP) but I imagine there would be considerations directly related to mysql like the select statements and possible additional tables.

Has anyone handled this sort of task before? I figure I'll just be reinventing the wheel if there are code/sql statement examples already out there.