Details

ISBN-10: 0226815811
ISBN-13: 9780226815817
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publish Date: 07/26/2022
Dimensions: 9.60" L, 7.00" W, 1.30" H

Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present

Hardcover

Price: $40.00

Overview

The first comprehensive intellectual history of alphabet studies.

Inventing the Alphabet provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet. Drawing on decades of research, Johanna Drucker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric references, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contributed to our modern understandings of the alphabet, one of the most important inventions in human history.

Beginning with Biblical tales and accounts from antiquity, Drucker traces the transmission of ancient Greek thinking about the alphabet’s origin and debates about how Moses learned to read. The book moves through the centuries, finishing with contemporary concepts of the letters in alpha-numeric code used for global communication systems. Along the way, we learn about magical and angelic alphabets, antique inscriptions on coins and artifacts, and the comparative tables of scripts that continue through the development of modern fields of archaeology and paleography.

This is the first book to chronicle the story of the intellectual history through which the alphabet has been “invented” as an object of scholarship.

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Reviews
"With Inventing the Alphabet, Drucker–scholar, interpreter, and designer of printed words and letters–sheds light on that which has brought humankind out of darkness."–Steven Heller, author, design critic, and cochair of the SVA MFA Design Department
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Details

ISBN-10: 0226815811
ISBN-13: 9780226815817
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publish Date: 07/26/2022
Dimensions: 9.60" L, 7.00" W, 1.30" H
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