Writing Beyond Writing: Lessons from Endangered Alphabets

The outcome of a life's work as a successful writer and a dozen years of researching the world's indigenous and minority writing systems, Writing Beyond Writing is an entirely original exploration of writing itself. As the world's leading investigator of rare alphabets, Brookes examines the world's fascinating and often stunning disappearing minority scripts and shows that writing can and often does have qualities we have forgotten--iconic qualities, community values, spiritual qualities, even magical qualities. He considers the ways in which we in the West have increasingly defined writing as something abstract, purely symbolic, merely a mechanical tool for representing the sounds of speech, and asks what is lost when writing is reduced to such a narrow and colorless definition. Yet the author shows that just as many cultures around the world are reviving their embattled traditional alphabets, even in the West the old division between writing and art is being healed in surprising ways, right under our noses.