Inventing the Alphabet

Reviews / Votes

"[Drucker] provides a rich, detailed account of how western thinkers have understood the origins and development of the alphabet. . . . Millions learn the alphabet in childhood, and Drucker's study opens up a fascinating realm of ideas and scholarship into its origins and meaning." * BBC History Magazine * "In its wealth of detail and generous illustration [Inventing the Alphabet] goes some way toward reproducing the experience of reading the catalogs and compendia it describes." * New York Review of Books * "Drucker takes us on a journey through centuries of intellectual history, from the musings of the first historians to the scientific methods of modern archaeologists and linguists. At the heart of it all is the alphabet: an invention that is both ubiquitously banal and world-changingly innovative." * History Today * "This latest book by Drucker is not primarily a new history of the alphabet, although it provides this history, but a historiographical work that traces the ways beliefs in Western thought shaped the discourse around the alphabet's origins. The author asks who knew what when and how people conceptualized the evidence available to them, from the earliest classical and biblical accounts to contemporary archaeological, epigraphical, and paleographical syntheses. . . Highly recommended." * Choice * "Johanna Drucker? 's Inventing the Alphabet is all about writing's material histories." * London Review of Books * "For ill and for good, our world remains profoundly alphabetized, from classroom rosters, to bureaucratic systems, to the labeling of our very genetic essence, even if random access, not ABC order, has become our everyday search mode. As Drucker somewhat shockingly reminds us. . . the ancient analog alphabet forms the substrate of our digital world." * Critical Inquiry * "Stunning. . . . Drucker deserves our full recognition for this masterpiece of bibliographical scholarship." * Publishing Research Quarterly * "Drucker -- who is an artist and typographer in her own right -- has given us an amazing, obsessive piece of scholarship to remind us that our alphabet is 'a major component of human systems' with implications that radically transcend the actual forms of the letters themselves." * Eye Magazine * "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