Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Golden Thread: The Story of Writing

The Golden Thread: The Story of Writing

Clayton, Ewan

Paperback

LinguisticsGeneral World History

ISBN10: 1619024721
ISBN13: 9781619024724
Publisher: Counterpoint LLC
Published: Jan 20 2015
Pages: 416
Weight: 1.00
Height: 1.30 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.80
Language: English
From the simple representative shapes used to record transactions of goods and services in ancient Mesopotamia, to the sophisticated typographical resources available to the twenty-first-century users of desktop computers, the story of writing is the story of human civilization itself.


Calligraphy expert Ewan Clayton traces the history of an invention which--ever since our ancestors made the transition from a nomadic to an agrarian way of life in the eighth century BC--has been the method of codification and dissemination of ideas in every field of human endeavour, and a motor of cultural, scientific and political progress. He explores the social and cultural impact of, among other stages, the invention of the alphabet; the replacement of the papyrus scroll with the codex in the late Roman period; the perfecting of printing using moveable type in the fifteenth century and the ensuing spread of literacy; the industrialization of printing during the Industrial Revolution; the impact of artistic Modernism on the written word in the early twentieth century--and of the digital switchover at the century's close.


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