SASA Book Club: "Writing Beyond Writing: Lessons from Endangered Alphabets"

In the nineteenth century, when an explorer returned to London or New York from distant lands, the tradition was to invite them to speak at the Royal Geographical Society or the Explorers Club, to report on their findings.

Tim Brookes has spent 13 years discovering the world’s fascinating indigenous and minority scripts and their cultures of origin.

He found scripts that have been banned and burned, script creators who have been assassinated, scripts consisting of geometrical patterns in sand, scripts used for divination and magic, scripts whose scribes abstained from sex before embarking on acts of writing or copying, and, perhaps most remarkable of all, a sacred Indian alphabet that is recited aloud as a religious ritual.

This book is the equivalent of his talk to the Explorers Club, and also the response to an imagined question from the imaginary audience: “What can we learn from your journey about writing…