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Inventing the Alphabet
The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present
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Format: Hardback
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Inventing the Alphabet
$8799
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?
This book is ideal for scholars, students, and readers interested in linguistics, history, archaeology, and the intellectual evolution of written language. Those fascinated by the cultural and scholarly significance of the alphabet will find this a richly rewarding read.
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Description
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.
Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?
BBC History Magazine praises Drucker's detailed account of western thinkers' views on the alphabet's origins, opening a fascinating realm of ideas. New York Review of Books notes the book's wealth of detail and generous illustrations, enhancing the reading experience. History Today highlights Drucker's journey through centuries of intellectual history, emphasising the alphabet as both mundane and revolutionary. The book is recognised as a historiographical work tracing Western beliefs shaping the discourse on the alphabet's origins.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780226815817
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 26 July 2022
Country: United States
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Illustration: 100 halftones
Audience: Professional and scholarly
DIMENSIONS
Width: 178.0mm
Height: 254.0mm
Weight: 250g
Pages: 384
About the Author
Johanna Drucker is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies and a distinguished professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has been the recipient of Fulbright, Mellon, and Getty Fellowships and in 2019 was the inaugural Distinguished Senior Humanities Fellow at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. Her artist books are included in museums and libraries in North America and Europe, and her creative work was the subject of a traveling retrospective, Druckworks 1972-2012: 40 Years of Books and Projects. Her publications include Visualizing Interpretation, Iliazd: Meta-biography of a Modernist, and The Digital Humanities Coursebook.
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